Stoopid
“Take notes as you explore your life. It’ll help you make sense of it.”
Have you ever done something stupid? Me either, but let me tell you a story about someone who did.
She was a planner… Wait, no, he was a planner who lived in...Denver. He was a writer, too, a poet playwright mostly and not much of an essayist until recently. But his essays were sporadic and tended to take a long time to produce, so his ambition of posting weekly and sometimes, in the spirit of excessive ambition, daily blogs flailed. But one day, he discovered a new planner/notebook that all the YouTube influencers in the planning community (it exists) were talking about: the Hobonici. So he bought one four on the promise that magical Tomoe river paper would arrange all that ambition into doable chunks. Two are small datebooks he uses for weekly scheduling and personal management—meetings, budget, work—boring stuff. The other two are larger books with monthly, weekly, and daily pages. The plan was this: use the smaller books for general boring stuff and the larger books for personal journaling and professional writing, as well as goal tracking along those personal and professional lines. The blog posts are already falling like leaves off a domino tree in October.
So why does one person with one life and one family and one part-time job need four planners? Well, that’s a good question, and surprisingly, that is not the stupid part. It gets stupider.
By mid-December 2020, he had all these planners, pens, stickers, mild-liners (they don’t say highlighters in the planning community) and a PhD (or perhaps an EdD) in YouTube-supported planning. But he was confused because what does one person with one life and one family and a part-time job do with four planners?
Obsesses. For a few weeks months.
By mid-January 2021, he had written quite a lot in planner A, we’ll call it the Chocolate planner (because it is brown), though much of the content was quotes:
“Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.” Gloria Steinem
Or lists:
21 Goals for 2021 (it has 12 items).
Or cryptic references:
Isadora Duncan’s scarf
The other planner, which we will call the Candle planner (because it has candles on it) was largely blank. Its defining characteristic was a large sticker on the inside cover that said, “Just Write.” Just indeed.
Have you ever worked really hard on something, grown frustrated by the process, and then realized you’d made it much harder than it needed to be because you did not read the directions? Or even better, you did not follow the directions that you had written to yourself on said something?
I did the dry January thing because I thought that was my intention for January. But I realized, after looking at the notes I had written to myself about that intention, that dry January was a path not the destination. The destination was presence. But I wrote it in so many different ways in so many places (I confess, it is I who bought four hobonichi) that I could not figure out where to find it again.
So how do I, as I tell my students, get my thoughts to the page in a manner that someone else can understand? Or, in this case, how do I get my thoughts onto the page in a manner I can understand?
I have to figure out what I am looking at before I decide what it means. I have to observe before I analyze. I tell my students that as well.
From here I see me: the big chocolate
This is my book of inspirations, affirmations, and confirmations. It’s my morning journal—where I record the freshest me on the newest day. Notes on my night and notes toward my day—all those things are clear in the morning but foggy by afternoon. This is where I look to figure out who I am so I can tell the day before the day tells me.
From here I see my health (mind, body, & soul): the little chocolate
Is it problematic that my health is covered in chocolate? This is a little brown book of data—weight, food, sleep, meds, and exercise stats. Mood as a number system. Not a lot of interpretation, just facts that tell their own story: Ms. Scarlet with the knife in the kitchen.
From here I see my life & work: the candle
Bring to light, right? That’s why I picked the candle cover. Ironically (or not, sometimes I am just not sure) unless you count blank pages as light, there is not much brought to light here. January is almost completely “light.” I wrote (somewhere) that I should only “carry the weight that lightens me.” Perhaps there is too much weight in my life and work right now for it to lighten me.
From here I see everything: the latte
I call this my daily carry—the journal I would carry around with me if I ever actually went anywhere. It’s a milky coffee-colored book of raw material. My commonplace book of notes, receipts, clippings, and ponderings collected on my travels throughout the day. Since my travels are limited in 2021, I carry it with me around the house. I chronicle everything. The leather cover features a laser-cut ultra-cool tatted-up woman adjusting her sunglasses. But yet I don’t refer to this planner as “the seeing.”
There is a tyranny of sight which prevents us from crediting what we perceive with other senses and in other ways. Perhaps my challenge is in the verb (it’s always the verb’s fault). Rather than giving myself instructions to “see” through these journals, I need to vex my verbs and distinguish the action of each journal as clearly as its respective colors and images. I need to understand what each does as well as I understand how each looks.
Because how will I make sense of my life if I can’t even sort out my notes on it?
