Well•come, kin. Pause, and take a deep, calming breath with me. In... and out... As you breathe, remind yourself of your innate wisdom and wholeness. With each breath—be here. Fully present, as we embark on this journey together.

LaShaun Certified behavior analyst, founding former Director of The University of South Florida’s (USF) Wellness Resource Center, Founder of GLOW Women’s Gathering with credentials in Neuroscience for Business from MIT Sloan.

Clickety-clack.
Clack. Clack.

How many times have you gone hunting for your next audacious idea on a keyboard?

A note to your sister-friend.
Next quarter’s business strategy.
A sentence that could save you from yourself.
A phrase for the audacious thing you know in your body but cannot yet get your mouth around.
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And yes, the devices are lovely. Efficient little glass-and-aluminum dopamine dispensaries (backlit rectangles of compressed anxiety and occasional brilliance). I have one by the bed, one in the office, one in the bag, one basically fused to my palm like an extra appendage. I have become, regrettably, a digerati.

And still.

There is something about paper.

Which is annoying, honestly.

I carry a small leftover wound from penmanship class. Mrs. She-Shall-Not-Be-Named. the ruler on the desk. the loops that had to match the laminated chart on the wall. the endless correction. the absolute perfection. she didn't teach handwriting so much as she *prosecuted* it and by the time that year ended, the joy I'd had in a pen, pencil and paper had been cross-examined out of me.

So I understand the keyboard as refuge.

But when I want to think-think: when I want the deeper current, the subterranean sentence, the idea with a pulse, I reach for the pen.

Because paper does not insist on sequence.
Real thinking zigzags.

A keyboard wants one thing after another after another.
Paper allows the side road. The arrow. The scribble. The word circled three times. The weird little box in the margin. The highlights in aesthetic colors. The sentence you drag halfway down the page because your mind changed mid-thought.
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Handwriting lets an idea arrive in its raw parts.
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​Alive.​
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Look at the Book of Kells.

Created around 800 AD by Irish monks. It is, by most measures, the most lavishly illuminated manuscript ever made. scholars still argue over which monk drew which letter. the knotwork alone, interlaced Celtic forms that travel across entire pages without a single break in pattern, suggests weeks of hand labor on a single capital letter. Aah, the colors: lapis lazuli blue, verdigris green, red lead were ground by hand, mixed with gall and egg, and applied with quills to calf-skin vellum. OMG.

It is absurdly magnificent. and no one who looks at it for more than thirty seconds comes away thinking: "I wish they'd had a laptop."

What you feel, looking at the Book of Kells, is that something poured through those monks' hands onto the page. that the slowness and the bodily labor did not impede the sacred: it *was* the sacred. the thinking and the making were not separate acts.

Then there's Octavia Butler, the MacArthur "Genius" grant. the first to break through science fiction's fortress. the author of *Kindred*, *Parable of the Sower*, *Bloodchild,* books that storied prophesied futures that are now, uncomfortably, arriving.

Sh would scrape together twenty-five cents to buy small Mead memo pads. in those pages she took notes on every aspect of her life: grocery lists, to-dos, calculations of remaining funds for rent, daily word counts, lists of her failings and desired personal qualities. she tracked everything, and she gathered material for her stories: lyrics to songs she'd heard on the radio, ideas for character names, topics to research, details from news stories.

She covered the walls of her office with reminders and maps. she wrote process notes as she drafted her novels, reminding herself what the story was about, which elements she wanted to highlight. she used different highlighters to color-code themes and ideas, writing different threads in various colors of marker and then going back to highlight those. the whole page brimmed with life.

And then (the thing that gets me every time I see it) in 1988, she wrote on the inside cover of a commonplace notebook: "I shall be a bestselling writer. After Imago, each of my books will be on the bestseller lists... This is my life. I write bestselling novels... So be it! I will find the way to do this. See to it!"

She wrote this when she was still broke. still working odd jobs to pay rent. still collecting rejection slips.

She wrote it by hand.

There’s something about the act of inscribing. slowly, in her own letters, on paper she'd paid a quarter for; seems to have made it more real than a typed affirmation could. the hand carrying the intention into the body. the body sealing the contract.
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A page can hold the mind in its natural habitat: associative, messy, image-making, doubling back, leaping tracks, leaving bread crumbs for itself.

Perhaps that is why longhand often feels less like recording a thought and more like catching one in the act.
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The monks of Kells knew something.
Octavia Butler knew something.
And now neuroscience is catching up to what their hands already understood.

Here is what the research is saying:.

First: handwriting recruits broader brain coordination than typing. In a 2024 high-density EEG study, handwriting showed more widespread theta/alpha connectivity than typewriting, especially across parietal and central regions. Those patterns are associated with memory formation and encoding new information. That does not prove handwriting always makes people more creative. It does suggest the brain is doing more integrated work when the hand is forming letters than when a finger is tapping keys.

Second: creative thought depends on conversation between large-scale brain networks, especially systems involved in spontaneous idea generation and systems involved in control, evaluation, and selection. A 2025 study found that creative ability was linked to the brain’s capacity to dynamically switch between the default mode network and executive control network. In plain English: good ideas tend to require both drift and discernment…wandering, then choosing. A 2024 study similarly found different neural dynamics when people generated creative ideas versus ordinary ones, with differences tied to executive control, default mode, and salience networks.

Third: the physical form of handwriting supports divergent thinking because paper is spatial. You are not confined to a single file of text. You can cluster ideas, map them, enlarge one word, scratch out another, draw a star beside the line that made your shoulders drop two inches. That matters. Creativity research increasingly treats it as a whole-network phenomenon rather than a single “creative center” in the brain. Reviews from the last few years keep returning to the interplay among default mode, executive control, and salience networks, along with curiosity and exploratory states.

Then there is the positive-psychology side of the house.

Writing practices do not need to be dramatic to be useful. A 2025 systematic review of positive expressive writing found the most consistent benefits in well-being and positive affect, especially in practices like best possible self and gratitude writing, though study quality was mixed and effects were not uniform. A 2023 systematic review and meta-analysis of gratitude interventions found improvements in gratitude, mental health, satisfaction with life, and lower anxiety and depression symptoms, while also noting methodological limitations and generally low certainty for some outcomes. So: encouraging, yes. Magical cure-all, no.

What does this mean for actual life?

If you need speed, type.

If you need polish, type.

If you need to find out what you really think. Write. By. hand.
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Because they create different conditions.
And conditions matter.

A simple practice:

Take one sheet of paper.
At the top, write:

what is trying to come alive here?
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paper. pen or pencil. no agenda.

Then give yourself seven minutes by hand.
No paragraphs required.
Use arrows.
Use fragments.
Make a mess worthy of your actual mind.

then stop. let the hand go where it wants. circle words. draw arrows to nothing. write something sideways. cross things out with feeling.

When you finish see if you can find.

• one phrase with emotion in it
• one surprise
• one thing you already knew but had not yet admitted

That is often where the real idea is waiting.

Don't chase the answer.
Trace the shape of what wants to be known.
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The monks did not have modern due dates.
You do.
Seven minutes is still enough to make something sacred.
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In sharing, you contribute to a bigger picture - a world pulsating with well-being and wholeness. I'm grateful for you!

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p.s. Reader,your best idea may not need a better app. it may need a pen and seven unsupervised minutes.
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​p.s.s. Consider this your highly scientific reason to buy that beautiful journal!
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