On Keeping a Notebook
Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores.
The point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess. At no point have I ever been able successfully to keep a diary; my approach to daily life ranges from the grossly negligent to the merely absent, and on those few occasions when I have tried dutifully to record a day’s events, boredom has so overcome me that the results are mysterious at best.
Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.
I sometimes delude myself about why I keep a notebook, imagine that some thrifty virtue derives from preserving everything observed. See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write - on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there.
The above content is from Slouching Towads Bethlehem by Joan Didion.
I’ve been writing things down since I was 13 years old but I’ve never really understood the true reason why I started writing. I wrote stuff down simply because I felt an urge to etch those words somewhere for some reason. Though some of it were lost during the years, a certain few remains. They evoke a part of me that’s no longer alive. Now I am in my 20s, I still keep a collection of notebooks for various topics. Yes, I hoard notebooks, yet I enjoy the process of putting pen to paper.
Write things down, not as an account of remembrance, but simply as an act of writing. Even if you don’t get anything out of it, over time, you will come to appreciate the art of writing. Keep your notebooks messy, it doesn’t have to be in order and not everything has to make sense. In due time you will find order in those chaos. With the advent of an AI first approach towads everything, in a few years, writing might even become one of the few ways to truly feel human. Always keep a notebook, commute with it, eat with it and slap every stray thought in it. Just keep writing, every day, even if its just a word or two, it all adds up in the end.