It’s sort of remarkable that I’ve reached this point in my blogging life and not really talked much about decluttering or minimalism. I am not a minimalist – far from it – but love the idea of it, and aspire to live with fewer things cluttering my house and mind.

Just as life is too short to eat terrible bread, it is also to short to use a terrible pen. Once upon a time I would pick up free pens wherever I saw one, and they were almost all terrible. The ink never runs freely and smoothly, they don’t last, and generally tend to be better advertisements than writing utensils.

The result of all this was that I used to have a drawer full of pens, but as most of them didn’t work or worked poorly, I usually grabbed the same one every day, most often a blue ink retractable Papermate Flexgrip, which I bought by the box.

I finally came to the conclusion that keeping things I would never use was silly and a waste of resources. If someone else can use it, then pass it along or, better yet, don’t acquire something I will never use or never really enjoy.

So the obvious first step was easy: stop taking free pens! Next, I took the pens I didn’t want and that worked ok to meetings with me, where someone usually forgot to take a pen and wanted to borrow mine. “Here, take this one, and keep it,” I would say, like Daddy Warbucks. Little did they know they were helping me out more than I was helping them.

Over the dozen or so years of this whittling down, I’ve made myself use pens that worked well but didn’t like until they finally ran out of ink. Now I can take the dead pens and throw them in a recycling bin at Staples, where I am optimistic they actually make something with them and not just greenwash them into the local landfill.

This morning the last Flexgrip I have gave up the ghost. I am left with a Bic Round Stic that Steven got at a conference. When it wears out, I have the Sheaffer pen someone gave me when I graduated high school in 1984. I was able to buy a new cartridge for it, and it will likely be the only ballpoint I will own.