First off: There are ten new one-of-a-kind Bebe fountain pens in the shop. It took me a little over a week to get these done, at around 8-10 hours of work per pen, on average. I usually schedule myself to work 12+ hour days, 7 days a week, based on how long tasks usually take to do.

I know that’s a lot of hours.

I do things besides work when I get done early. There’s the major painting I’m working on currently, for example. It’s 6 feet (72 inches) by 4 feet (48 inches) and I’ve mixed custom paint and created entirely new kinds of inks for this piece. I figured, when I started it, that it’d take at least a year to do. It’s called Chasing Fireflies.

I don’t know if you’ve ever chased fireflies before, but in short, it’s a mad dash towards a moving light in the pitch black darkness. You search after these elusive lights, knowing full well that you probably won’t catch it, while still, against odds and data and experience, run after each new one as if maybe, this time, you will. The odds of it blinking out of sight before you get close are high, but you chase anyway for the sheer joy of running through the night surrounded by glowing, dancing, streaks and blinks of otherworldly-seeming lights. You chase fireflies to experience the brief moment of exhilaration at finding that light in the dark, and to feel that surge of hope that you might catch it. (Often without a clue what you’d do if you did.)

Chasing fireflies is what chasing happiness feels like as an adult, only it seems like somewhere along the way we’ve been taught that the point is to actually catch the fireflies, and that we’re failures for not being able to. Or, worse, when we do catch one? We find ourselves disappointed, heartbroken, confused, angry, or despairing because the light that was supposed to be happiness in the palm of our hands was nothing more than a bug with a glowing butt. Were we stupid? Did the bug lie to us? Why did we waste our time chasing a bug with a glowing butt in the dark? Shouldn’t we have known better? What did it get us?

We’ve forgotten that the point was always the experience of how it felt to chase those ethereal, flickering lights, to experience the surreal magic of being surrounded by erratic streaks of light in the dark. It was never the firefly that was holding happiness, nor was it about being good at the chase or how long it lasted or how many we caught. It was simply to be able to experience what it was like to chase fireflies. To have that moment where we suspend knowing that we’re all chasing bugs with glowing butts in the dark in trade for the way it feels to have hope calling us forward into the darkness. For that moment where we can forget fear enough to risk running after an experience we want, even when we’re unable to fully see where we’re going.

Humans need that. We need times where we stop judging and shaming ourselves for chasing a bug with a glowing butt frantically and to allow ourselves the grace and compassion to chase our fireflies in the dark.

Without shame and without judgment, I hope you chase fireflies.

A. Markov