📿 This Is A Sweet Weird Thing

People Can Be Inexplicable. What if that's not a problem?

Klänge Pl.07 (1913) Wassily Kandinsky

Hello you, Adreanna here with this week’s dispatch of The Laundry —

Earlier this week our friend Kim texted Lodro and I with a question. Why is it that some people feel compelled to keep old pens that no longer function? She had just taken on a new job in someones home who apparently stashed defunct pens. Were these pens momentos? Was keeping them a personal compulsion? Nobody can know for sure. Perhaps the pen stasher themselves doesn’t quite know why they keep their used up pens. Sometimes it can be like that. Call it habit or impulse, our own motivations are not always known, even to ourselves.

Lodro, who knew that I was writing this week’s dispatch, joked in our text thread that I would address Kim’s question as my topic for The Laundry. I texted back that I actually would — and also, thank you Kim for the writing prompt! If Buddhist teachings are called Dharma, and “dharma” translates from Sanskrit as “the way of things” or “phenomena”, then surely everything, all phenomena — including the urge to keep dead pens — is fodder for our practice. Or at least a doorway of curiosity into exploration, which is so much of what practice includes. This has always been one of the aspects of Buddhist meditation that I’ve found most appealing. That nothing is excluded. Everything is practice. The path is what’s right in front of you. Every mundane crumb is sacred.

So why is it, then, that some people keep pens that no longer actually function? The most honest answer is that I can’t know. It’s not for me to know. Because there’s likely no uniform answer. Why does anybody do what they do, whether that “doing” is intentional or not? People are delicious mysteries. Maybe the pen stash has something to do with establishing a feeling of safety or belonging (as so many of our actions do). Perhaps it’s a tiny comfort. Or a choice to prioritize other things. Maybe there’s not time, or necessity or want to clean out the pen drawer when there’s other work to be done. Maybe keeping defunct pens is an act of disobedience. Where this person’s chaos energy is channeled. We have to funnel our chaos somewhere, even — and maybe especially — the most organized amongst us. (Mine manifests in many “junk” drawers).

Maybe the motivation to keep these pens lives somewhere at the intersection of attachment and aversion— which is a particularly Buddhist take. My own personal version of this is hoarding incandescent light bulbs, which I find to be the most beautiful form of indoor lighting. When I read that incandescents would be phased out in the United States the summer of 2023, I squirreled away boxes and boxes of 60 watt bulbs because I was so resistant to the idea of suffering under lifeless LED bulbs for the rest of my days. I have about a year’s worth of incandescent bulbs left in my stash so the indignity of bad lighting has been postponed. Attachment plus aversion can be incredibly motivating.

Maybe just wondering about this person’s pens is a doorway to curiosity, interest and attention. As long as that door isn’t shut by judgement. Isn’t locked by the decision that they’re wrong. If I’m being honest with myself, at least half of my self-produced unhappiness is caused by wondering why someone doesn’t do things the way that I do — which is another way of saying: why don’t they do things the right way? Everybody has their peccadillos and quirks. Which I find absurdly charming about people until those quirks impact me in an undesired way. People grow unevenly, and sometimes include odd and difficult shapes. The simple generosity of acceptance and offering the benefit of the doubt can be an entire practice unto itself.

Klänge Pl.23 (1913) Wassily Kandinsky

Why is it that some people keep pens that don’t function? Why do any of us do anything, really? Maybe the most meaty part of this question is the invitation to notice what is evoked within us. The curiosity, the judgement, the interest, the theories. What’s the most generous assumption we could make in this case? Perhaps the most generous assumption is that there IS a reason, even if we can’t see it. And that it might not even be our place to see it. Much less figure it out. Maybe our place is just to accept that it is. That this is something that somebody needs to do, for reasons that matter to them.

Maybe the practice is not in solving the mystery of the dead pens, but in loosening our grip on needing to solve other people at all. To let them be a little strange. To let ourselves be a little strange. To notice the impulse to categorize, correct, diagnose, or dismiss — and instead remain, even if for a few extra beats, in the open space of not-knowing.

Because I have a hunch that we all have our proverbial drawers of dead pens. Our odd little attachments. Our irrational collections and personal compulsions and ways of making life feel manageable. I hoard light bulbs. Some people save old birthday cards, cracked mugs, obsolete cords, jeans that no longer fit, relationships that no longer nourish them. We keep things past their usefulness all the time. Not always because they are useful, but because they once were. Because they accompanied us. Because getting rid of them would require acknowledging change.

And maybe this is where the question becomes less about pens and more about tenderness. The tenderness required to look at another person’s inexplicable habits without turning them into evidence of failure or wrongness. The tenderness to recognize our own. To laugh gently at the absurdity of being human without hardening against it.

Which is the sense that I got from Kim’s question about the pens on our text chain — that it was a noticing of a sweet, weird thing that someone else does, because we all do sweet weird things. Which is another way of saying that noticing the collection of dead pens was noticing evidence of someone’s humanity.

And is there anything more intimate than that? Every mundane crumb, after all, has the potential to be seen as sacred. Including the ones that we don’t understand.

To your practice,