life as best as i remember it…

Most of my friends know that for the greater part of the last 12 years I’ve kept a notebook. As much as I blog, I just can’t seem to rid myself of putting pen to paper and capturing thoughts on page. There is something organic about scribbling down life’s happenings in the pages of a notebook as a way to process through the variety of moments we encounter every day.

I started keeping a notebook around my sophomore year in high school. I think it was my grandmother who suggested it would be a good way to capture life and journal my prayers to God. While I thought it was more like keeping a diary for most of that year, I soon learned that writing was an outlet without which I couldn’t keep my sanity. Page after page, notebook after notebook, I have found solace in physical act of writing. I have found that keeping a notebook has been for me the essence of the contemplative life as I have disciplined myself to write at least once a day, even if just to capture a song lyric that won’t leave my head. (Note: There are several other factors that go along with a truly contemplative life such as meditation and prayer that I’ve yet to master, journaling just happens to be the one I most enjoy and so am really good at.)

I can’t even recall all the drama my notebooks have seen: love and loss, lust and regret; anger and grace; bitterness and forgiveness; joy and depression and joy and depression and joy and… well you get the picture. In notebooks I have captured deep love for God and sincere questioning of the one in whom I place eternal trust. I have written on the sanctity of my life with Jenna and the earthy sacred births of my children.

This post actually commemorates the start of a new notebook. While I usually prefer the snobbishly hip Moleskine, this time I opted for a $1.99 Target number. I wrote my first entry the other night. I found it so strange to me how nostalgic I got over writing a few pages in a book; perhaps it is because starting a new notebook always seemed like this start of a new chapter in my life or a monumental trip I was taking. However, even with that said this time around doesn’t feel as such. It doesn’t seem like a new chapter; I’m not journaling some great trip. It is what it is, something that I need to keep doing because I have found life in the exercise of writing, actually taking the time to use my handwriting skills to jot down thoughts and snippets of inspiration as I process through the life I’ve been given to live.

PS. If you enjoy notebooks as much or more than I do, check out the following fan sites:

Notebookism and Moleskinerie