Notebooks — Again

June 2, 2023

 

I’ve written several posts about notebooks. Mostly about trying to figure out how to use them. What to put where, how to separate the different things I write – the daily journaling, dreamwork, morning pages (if and when I do them), the story ideas about the several projects I find myself gravitating between as I still can’t find the one project that I can fully immerse myself in, the quotes from novels, or craft books, or memoirs, or notes from classes I’ve attended. So many darn things. 

They all are the same thing as they all are an extension of who and what I am — and they are also separate entities, parts that need special space. 

And for so many years I have clutched my hair and pulled at it while growling as I figure out what system might work. I have a daily journal and dreamwork goes into it — no conflict there. I bought A4 notebooks for morning pages but haven’t used them consistently and when I do morning pages they often go into the daily journal — black Kanso Noto notebooks that my spouse keeps me supplied with as birthday and anniversary gifts. 

I also use the A5 Kanso Notos for projects — the Karate Stories, Boiling Frogs, The Temple Story — a separate one for each. And a notebook for craft reflections or reactions to socio-political situations in India. A B5 pale green binder-carry all, I bought in the Kyoto Tokyu Hands, where I can move the pages around, works for classes. 

Sounds like that system might have worked? It seemed ordered and each book too was orderly by my standards. It was ok, but it also was not. Something was too ‘separate’ with this way of storing things. 

So, this year I melded all, except the binder for classes, into one Kanso Noto notebook which I carry everywhere — even when I know I won’t have time to write.

This year more than ever I felt I didn’t know where life was leading, who I was becoming, yet I  knew that it was time to change — myself, my habits, what I do with the days of my life. It is, I am, a work in progress. Yes, I know we all are, always.

But aren’t there times you feel a strange and scary current swooshing something along and though on the outside nobody sees you swirling, your insides are constantly in motion. Those times when you know an external something is turning you around and around till you feel unbalanced and unable to know the direction you are facing, or putting down barriers in your days and hours that mess up your plans. Nothing during this time works the way you want it to. You fight it, try to get back control, get back the illusion of order but in the end, frustrated and angry, you surrender to it?

My current notebook is pure chaos and there is an urge to make the page even more messy every day. I do that by sticking bits of stuff in it, using small post-its, different coloured inks, writing zig-zag or up and down. The notebook is a reflection of my disordered current mental state. 

But how ‘therapeutic’ or at least revealing to have a picture of that disturbed internal state. The first step to understanding anything is knowing the bits, the way they are — pattern-less and highly disconnected. Then if I am lucky, a new pattern might emerge, change might follow. 

And maybe luck has nothing to do with it and I need to ‘work’ to sort it out? Don’t know, but I am enjoying creating chaos on the pages. I have kept an empty first page and use it as a messy index that might help me find something relevant when I choose to look for it. It helped me write a short story recently based on things I had put under sisters.

Lately I have been acquiring tiny A6 books, though I haven’t begun using them yet. In the past I don’t remember ever being attracted to this size of book. Perhaps they are a part of my future?