I am sitting in the Lufthansa Senator Lounge at the Frankfurt Airport. I checked in with the Lufthansa App on my iPhone, booked and paid for the taxi to the airport with mytaxi, and am tipping these lines into my iPad. My day is completely digital. Surrounded by screens, I spend a lot of time with the digital helpers and I am happy they exist. I was even able to find the video I am going to recommend to you shortly because I was surfing the net at night and came across this great Ted Talk.
When you find a film like “Why the Pencil is perfect”, you are reminded how wonderful it is to write with a pencil. I couldn’t help myself. I quickly researched the information about the pencils and found out what the Blackwing and Dixon were about. Then I read that the roots from Blackwing go back to Faber-Castell – and land on the Faber-Castell website, perhaps the greatest manufacturer of pencils (Stabilo might beg to differ ?). And what did I find there? The Perfect Pencil. A product series from Faber-Castell that makes the vile hexagonal pencil manageable for the travelers among us.
Inefficient, but beautiful
I couldn’t leave well enough alone: At the next opportunity, I headed to a stationary store and purchased myself the “Perfect Pencil”. And what happened? I rediscovered the beauty of writing by hand and a different way of thinking when there is a pencil in the hand. It is so relaxing for me to just concentrate on the paper when I write in my Moleskine notebook [1]. It is so sensuous when the pencil is turning in the built-in sharpener. It is simply so much more fulfilling than thinking with the iPad. Yes, unfortunately, it is not efficient. Writing, scribbling, slowly sharpening, stopping the train of thought to sharpen the pencil, or the reality that I then type in the text into my electronic helper, such as I did for this article.
Open your mind with a pencil in the hand
Having a pencil in your hand creates a different quality of thinking. For me, it creates an atmosphere that almost magically stimulates my creativity and desire to create. An atmosphere in which I can slow down, so that I feel by decelerating I am actually increasing my productivity. An atmosphere that helps me find my own center. The acceleration through the chip, through the computer on the table in front of me, allows me to perhaps conquer the daily work more quickly, but it prevents me from contemplating the way. It prevents openness, described by Richard Sennett in his new book “Die offene Stadt” as the necessary thought component in modern times.
So, grab your pencil! It doesn’t need to be the “Perfect Pencil”. Although it really is perfect.
[1] You are certainly going to say: He’s crazy naming one brand after the other. Is he getting paid? No, I am not. And I also am not writing a review. However, it makes a difference for me if there is a good story behind the products (even if it was only created for marketing purposes, as is the case with Moleskine), or if I simply choose a no-name product which is typically just as good.
Foto: pixabay – Monoar