Noticing the details
A journaling prompt to help you be more present to the magic that is your life
I have journaled since I was nine years old.
My first journal book was one of those little hard-backed diaries, securable with a tiny lock. It had a horse on the cover. I wrote in it in code for a while—an alphabet I created to augment the secrecy of my musings.
As soon as I misplaced the key to the code, which I did quite soon after I created it, those entries became secret to me too.
I kept journaling through middle and high school and into college. And then, in a pregnancy-hormone-induced fugue state sometime in the year 2000, longing for a new beginning unmoored from my past self’s solipsistic ramblings, I tossed them all into the trash.
Sometimes I imagine these journals, of many dimensions and colors and designs, full of youthful musings and rants, blushingly explicit descriptions of all kinds of adventures and awakenings, perhaps a few passably decent bits of prose and poems…
sitting in that Hefty bag hundreds of feet deep in the Tajiguas landfill.
Lost to me forever.
Longing to be unearthed and held in the hands that made them.
Anyways.
I have continued, in the years since, to fill notebooks, from two to four per year. My standard version is a black 8.5x11” hardback sketchbook, unlined. It’s a big thing to lug around, but I find the spaciousness of the pages invites amplified expression.
When one is full, I use a sparkly marker to write the date range on the spine and the important milestones/learnings on the front. Then, it goes onto a shelf with its brethren. Off I go to the art store to buy a new book.
When I pile them into a stack and stand beside them, they stand as high as my belly button.
Very few objects hold as much meaning for me.
The journals are a mess:
scrawled thoughts, stories, poems, drawings, dreams, future plans, present-moment revelations.
Since I started producing children, the journals have been a terrific home for milestone moments and glued-down mementoes: children’s drawings, certificates, news clippings, programs from shows.
I go to the journals to say the unsayable, practice difficult conversations, figure my shit out, make notes for artistic projects, scrawl out nuggets of wisdom from this or that workshop I attend.
Sometimes all I can muster are boring chronicles of navel-gazing self-exploration, physical symptoms, or things I have to get done. And sometimes, when I cut loose and just write without plan, forethought, or self-censoring, a bit of gold spills out onto the page.
Journaling is a popular pastime these days.
Lots of great journaling programs and prompts are available here on Substack and elsewhere (I’m thinking of you,
). I want to share a prompt from Lynda Barry’s book Syllabus that I’ve been using lately. It has helped me love my life more and get the heck out of my head.It’s simple: you draw a four-chambered table about the size of a page in your journal. You make a little header for each chamber. Top left: Things I did. Top right: Things I saw. Bottom left: Something I heard. Bottom right: Draw something you saw.
Then, you make a list in each box, and a doodle in the one on the bottom right.
When I first started working with this prompt, using it to reflect on the day before, I realized how little attention I was paying to my life as it happened.
I would sit, stumped, searching my memory.
I’d open my horrifyingly packed iCal calendar to see: What did I do yesterday? What did I see? Was there something I heard that would be cool to chronicle? I have a very rich life! Why am I not remembering things?
As a result of using this prompt, I have started to track life more carefully, looking for details that I can put into these entries.
It’s still a work in progress, but it is for sure helping me be more present in my life and to spend less time in spin-cycle, self-centered rumination.
Mary Oliver, in her instructions for living a life, advised: “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”
This prompt, as a practice, is helping me to do just that.