On Writing

Here are a few journaling topics, should you feel so inclined. It has been an unusual Christmas season to wrap up an unusual year.

This is the one thing I recommend for basically everyone, keeping some format of a journal where you write some lines a day. 

In a stationery shop where preferences and details are so personal and vary so widely, from nib sizes to pen sizes to paper smoothness to mixing technology and analogue, so much of what we try and do is find just the right thing that you’re looking for. There are relatively few things that I would suggest for everyone in a blanket way, but this is one of them. 

We are three months into the global pandemic here in Toronto, and it’s unclear how the path going forward is going to look, us feeling our way around in the dark and murky future of lagging measures.

Perhaps you are thinking of starting a journal but don’t know where to begin. The answer: anywhere! The first page, or the second page, or in the middle of your notebook. You don’t need to start a new journal or notebook. I’m sure most of you have already figured out the logistics to that.

These are unprecedented times, and while everything is unprecedented for kids (woah! School is starting! A vacation! Wow! A bike!) this is really a wild time, and it’s been a nice break from all of the craziness to see Caleb’s perspective on our days.

If you have a lot of time on your hands, you’re at home self-isolating, going a little screwy, it’s might be a good opportunity to build in a daily break from your screens, your phone, Netflix, and just find a place to sit with a pen and a notebook. Making an effort to do this once or a twice a day might help with a bit of structure and mental decompressing, while also being a record of a very unusual time in recent history.

Some of you may remember a while back when I got one of my favourite pens, a sort of translucent yellow green Sailor, as part of the Sailor "Highlighter" Set - the pen along with a bottle of yellow Sailor highlighter ink. It's truly a fluorescent yellow, and I didn't think I would ever use it - in fact, I contemplated giving it away while I could still consider it a completely new and unused bottle.