Does It Spark Joy?

I haven’t watched any of Kondo’s series, or read any of her books, but the phrase is in the air enough that I’ve heard it.

It’s evocative, is it not? Joy, that elusive essence, that pure distillate of happiness, of which we could all use more.

It’s a phrase which has been floating around in my head for… a while now. I’ve been measuring a thing in my life, trying to find if it does indeed spark joy, and despite almost desperate digging after it, the spark has indeed fled.

Pen repair no longer sparks joy. It did, without question, but for the past few months what I’ve been feeling is less the heady sense of wholesome resurrection and more the crushing burden of responsibility for the joy of others. Recently I put a new sac into a 1940s Waterman Nurse’s Pen (which was basically a white version of the Starlet, itself a short variant of the Stalwart), which returned it to service for the original owner, who had gotten it when graduating nursing college. That one had the hoped-for spark, but it mainly served to underline the contrast with a lot of other work I’ve done lately.

Don’t get me wrong, especially if you’re someone I’ve done work for in the past year. I am happy to have helped, I am sensible of the authentic gratitude that has come my way, but… let me repeat the key phrase: crushing burden of responsibility. It was always there, but it has come to eclipse a lot of the other emotional elements in my business.

So, since I am entirely my own boss in this, I’m getting out of that business. I suspect this won’t be a permanent departure, but until I can consider the notion of fixing someone else’s pens and not have a twinge of authentic dread, not unlike the sense most of us get one waking and discovering it’s Monday again, I’m out.

What that means here is… probably not much, given what the content has been of late. I may even find, with the removal of the damp blanket of dread, that I have more pen things to discourse about. I’m not promising anything, especially while I’m pursuing this month of entries on the fiction front, but it’s certainly possible.

The pens, after all, are still sparking joy.