Technology is ubiquitous in modern-day life. We have computers, email, high-speed Internet, mobile devices, an ever-growing collection of apps, artificial intelligence.
One of my favorite tools, one that I have occasion to use almost every day? Pen and paper.
I like a good (or even better, great) pen. They may be fun to look at, shop for and use. Paper, likewise, is interesting, important, often perhaps most appreciated when you have run out. You can fold it into shapes or use it to wrap things.
For the tool of pen and paper, we care about both together, the combination of the two – where they allow you to do, what you would not be able to with either individually. Applying pen to paper opens up a wide range of possibility, literally at your fingertips.
It is a simple tool, almost deceptively so. Pen, paper – easy. There is virtually no learning curve at all on the essential mechanic: You use one to leave marks on the other. There are no settings to learn, no manual to peruse or firmware updates to worry about.
As a tool, you see it, but it gets out of the way. It is so undemanding – you impose on it, rather than it on you – that you can keep all your attention focused on the work at hand: using the tool to do something interesting.
Both pen and paper are patient and neither are overly restrictive in how you want to use one to express yourself on the other. You can write – words, sentences, paragraphs, bulleted or numbered lists, neat or messy. You can fill the page with text from left to right, top to bottom, in one column or many, or change directions arbitrarily, however you like.
Of course you are not restricted to just writing. Perhaps you use words where it makes sense, but otherwise draw or diagram, visualize what is in your imagination, however you can make sense of it.
With all of that, you control the scale, so you can get very close and highlight minute details or zoom way out, giving instead attention to very high-level perspectives. Trees, the pattern of their bark or the forest and how it fits into the ecology of a geographic area – it is up to you.
You can do a lot, but you cannot do everything. You can use the pen to fill the page, but at some point it is full and there will not be room left for more. You probably feel the restraint of that a lot sooner in different ways.
Blank space – the parts of the paper that you do not mark with a pen – can also serve a function. Filling it in can take away from that. Everything you do put on paper – whether it is words, drawings or symbols – will almost invariably serve as anchor points for anything that is added afterwards. Everything you put on the page is in distinction of and perhaps in relationship to whatever else is there.
So the paper and its dimension limit you and more subtly: once you begin using the pen to mark, you limit what is going to be on that paper. This is an important counter-balance to the otherwise unrestrained flexibility of it.
Pen and paper, together, is a remarkable tool for thinking. It is so simple to use, it virtually disappears from your mind, allowing you to focus entirely on the thinking itself. It is flexible enough to allow you to put your thinking on the page in the ways you can imagine. But there is enough restraint that you will still go somewhere with it.
It invites easy and frequent use and enables a wide variety of practice.