During one of my recent coop-ups at home, I watched The Wolf of Wall Street for the third or fourth time and was glued to the scene at the end of the movie. Jordan Belfort, presumably reformed, is introduced to a crowd of would-be moguls eager for advice from the bad boy of quick fortunes.

Belfort, convincingly played by Leonardo DiCaprio, takes the stage in an untucked dress shirt and new jeans to a round of applause. He stops, sighs, and surveys the room like a hungry carnivore, inspecting the meat. He quietly walks offstage and approaches several eager attendees in the front row and raises his pen.

“Sell me this pen,” he asks.

As they stumble upon various responses from pedestrians, “Um… that’s an awesome pen,” “Well, that’s a nice pen,” and “I personally love this pen.” I found myself chiming in from the couch: “Come on, you can do better than that!”

Eventually I asked the question to myself. How would you sell that pen?

That pen is power. It makes communication tangible and memorable. It is part of a creative process that physically involves the more than 30 muscles of the human hand in the act of inspiration and influence. That pen is how we organize and formulate our thoughts into universally recognizable symbols. It’s a proof of concept, napkin math and calculations on the back of an envelope. It is the dotting of I’s and the crossing of T’s in a universal attempt to teach, train and elucidate. That pen is our bayonet in the deep, dark trenches of selling and persuasion.

However, I soon realized that I can’t think of this pen in the same way that I did last year. Disease, death, pandemics, riots, and massive job losses have changed things. This has been a tough year for many; I’m no exception 2020 has tested our mettle, challenged our sensibilities, and evoked tribal coping skills few modern generations have had to muster. We all experience that momentous moment in the second week of April when we come face to face with the bubonic gaze of our 14th century ancestors.

As we masked up, hid, and obsessed with our body temperature, the world became a place of them and us. The hoarders and hand wringers: the Wile E. Coyotes and the Chicken Littles. The coronavirus proved heartless and indiscriminate; an alien life form that slithered into large cities and small towns, creeping surreptitiously as ‘the blob’ peering through the halls of the Colonial Theatre.

We obediently distance ourselves and disembark from our fellow man. Self-imprisoned Rapunzels cowering in our makeshift towers: We zoomed in and remotely, loaded and unloaded in a daily ritual that got raw and sloppy.

The world of touch suddenly turned suspicious. Light switches, doorknobs, keys, and buttons became Ground Zero for respiratory droplets. We ordered from Amazon but were afraid of delivery boxes. We brave the grocery store but stress over the card reader. We count 14 days from each chance encounter with the postman and cashier. We had pandemic planners, blue surgical gloves, and N-95 masks, but we would have easily given up our kingdom for some toilet paper.

The mental gymnastics of following the door handle to our hands, our hands to our face, and our face to our eyes, was exhausting. As our minds and bodies fell apart and our relationships disintegrated, there were no trend lines to track the spread of sadness and desolation.

So how would you sell this pen in 2020? I’d say it’s our chance to once again wrap our bare-gloved fingers around the palpable and tactile joys of life. It is a means to pour our inner monologue of hope onto a page and recreate the poetry of proximity. It’s our chance to pull the chairs closer, remove the footprint stickers, and refill the theaters and restaurants with the beautiful unmasked faces of humanity.

This feather is self-determination. It’s a means to writing a better ending: getting out of this Truman Show and venturing beyond the dome where the simulation ends and the slow dances begin. This is how we find our way home and break the demarcation lines of safe distance to return to the beautiful chaos of reckless union.

If you don’t buy this pen right now in September 2020, then my friend, don’t believe in returns.