I'm a little wary of the pens that look too beautiful. I tend to fall in love with them, then loose them, and I then have to cope with a kind of double mourning : the grief linked to the disappearance of  a loved one that has accompanied me during a certain part of my life, like an extension of my intellect;  and the guilty feeling towards an other loved one, the person who offered me this very pen. 
Therefore, the only beautiful pen of my life lies quietly in its casket, deep in a closet, mummified, for fear of losing it. I should equip it with an Argos beacon. It's a Montblanc Meisterstück offered by my parents at the very beginning of my career, when I was a new comer in the journalism world. In those days, the pump was not perfected (it was a pump model with large nib) and each time I was taking the plane (Air Inter, the charters to adventure for the ones who were born by that time), I had to bring a spare shirt and jacket : my Meisterstück would work like an automatic Kalachnikov and I always ended up with an oil slick around my heart ... And, above all, I always had to check where it was and make sure that I hadn't lost it. Today, it's in my office's closet. We rarely see each other, but always with pleasure.
 
I then started to use a type writer with 4 fingers, converting the writing into a staccato that parses the letters while it used to be a long thread that you would pull out of yourself and twist, the deletions being part of the manuscript like scars, giving evidence of your fight with the words. The cosmetic asepsis of the copy-and-paste has deeply modified our intelligence in the act of writing and the way we represent it.

As a coach, I work with customers whose writing has become commonplace, drowned in the computers or Blackberry keyboards, a writing that has lost all functions but the one to transmit information. The first exchange I have with them is always about the story of their life, that I ask them to relate with whatever medium they like, therefore reinvesting the ludic and aesthetic dimension of the act of writing, and thus revealing its identity. To me, to write with a pen on some nice paper that slides or slightly grates appears to be the first gesture towards the reconstruction of the expression of identity, talking about our intentions, our beliefs, our values, our hopes, our dreams.

This come-back to a writing that emanates right from the heart is also linked to the sense given to our tool. The belief that we write ''badly'', or that we ''cannot write'', the fear of the reader's glance, take us back to school times and uncomfortable learnings that are deeply engraved, thus hampering people who, as Nietzsche put it, will never try ''to give birth to a dancing star'', for they are absolutely persuaded that there is a lead weight in their pen.
A nice love story with a beautiful pen, it's a first step towards this freedom, be it unearthed or found again.

Pierre Blanc-Sahnoun
pbsh.coach@gmail.com
 
Pierre BLANC-SAHNOUN is a company coach, member of the Atlantic Cooperative of Human Ressources. He lives in Bordeaux and works for large enterprises, SME, as well as community groups. He wrote several books and columns about the art of being the author of one's professional life. »