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Maura Casey's avatar

I am 65. I have kept notebooks and journals since January of 1971, when I was 13, when my very young teacher in his very first job in education, told us all to get notebooks and, "write. Just, write." He said not to worry about outlines, structure or spelling. He would check to see that we were doing this semester-long assignment, but we could get an A by just doing it, and any rewards we could reap were entirely up to us. I have been reaping the rewards of that first assignment for 52 years. Keeping journals gave me joy, an island of sanity in a world full of upheaval, and eventually a profession. I have crates and crates of notebooks and have new ideas all the time for more notebooks. Currently I have three going: My day-to-day journal, a meditation insight journal, a writing idea notebook. Often I don't even go back to read them, but they help me in the moment. Keeping notebooks is a process that is meaningful, perhaps, only to me, and when I die I imagine my burdened children can have one hell of a bonfire with all of them!

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Lisa Olivera's avatar

I just love this so much. I'm working on returning to note-taking and handwriting, practices that buoyed me as a child and got taken over by the efficiency of typing. I sometimes wonder what I lost when I replaced the art of writing in a notebook with the tendency to go toward Scrivener or my computer instead; slowly finding my way back. Thank you for sharing.

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