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The Simple Pleasure of Finishing a Notebook

finishing a notebook 2020

Closet organizing is one of those rewarding, awful activities you just have to do. Research (see: Marie Kondo) has shown that the more together your life is, the more likely you have a clean, organized, beautiful space that helped you achieve that togetherness, and vice versa.

Like many things, it’s a vicious cycle.

The longer you put off organizing your closet, room, house, life, the harder it gets to just do it.

Of course, if you only have two shirts to hang in an otherwise clean, organized room, that takes a minute or less, so it’s easy to do it. There’s no pep talk necessary, whereas if the space you have to tackle is bigger and way messier, some convincing goes into it.

Knowing how many people struggle with organizing, I feel lucky that I’m able to find joy in it.

There is one thing that gets me excited: knowing I’ll eventually get to my JOURNAL COLLECTION!

My journals are the glue that holds my life, memories, experiences, and lessons together, and they’re my most valuable possession. Reading through them is always a trippy journey for me.

Going from one notebook to another, I become my younger self and feel so overwhelmed by happiness to have at my disposal such a simple, yet complex time-traveling machine to put myself in her shoes.

My 3rd grade Barbie diary shows me more about who I was than photos, videos, or long-term memory ever could. Reading through them, I quite literally see how my thoughts developed, how my values came to be, the exact period I started liking something.

“If you didn’t write it down, it never happened.”

My meditation routine, exercise regimen, and journaling habit have proven extremely helpful, especially for my mental health.

A notebook is one of the most beautiful things to me. However, they can be hard to finish, no pun intended, especially when used as anything resembling a journal. A Vox writer went deeper into the mystery of unfinished notebooks in this article.

Unfinished notebooks, articles, chapsticks, are common sources of shits and giggles online. Can’t blame us, humor is a top tier protective mechanism.

Today I won’t be lovingly making fun of myself. I wanted to celebrate simple pleasures. Especially in difficult times, like Coronavirus-quarantined-as-we-speak times, simple pleasures can provide so much happiness.

This Sunday morning, I finished a notebook I got in September 2018.

Given a little accident involving the fact that 90% of the pages had fallen out prior and, well, my 1-year-old niece finding much joy in that, I would have to read through it again so I could put the pages in the correct order.

Bonus points for not having to organize my room to experience that time-traveling feeling. I was happy as a kid, let’s say happy as my niece was that afternoon as she played with my notebook (👀), thinking I would get a chance to read through the past two years:

  • remembering
  • laughing
  • feeling,

in ways that wouldn’t have been available to me weren’t it for this small notebook. This small bundle of joy. This big simple pleasure.

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1 thought on “The Simple Pleasure of Finishing a Notebook”

  1. It’s all good. You are aware that “trippy” moments are what they are. So cool! Feel good moments. Negative thoughts have no positive purpose.

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