In that DaVinci class I teach, we encourage our students to explore a wide range of interests, prompting them with ploymaths like George Washington Carver and, of course, Leonardo da Vinci. This has also been a problem of mine.
Wide-ranging and far-reaching exploration of things, especially novel interests, is always exciting to me. It does, however, take me away from things I also enjoy doing. When it does, even simple barriers, like the time it takes to log on to the computer and access my website, stand a bit taller. It is so much easier to grab one of my notebooks or journals and write there instead.
I recently discovered a small set of three notebooks produced by Field Notes and, prior to the holidays, I fell victim to an extra impulse buy. However, this is one I knew would benefit me. Every night, I write in a journal, not about my day, but about past events. The need to process and reflect on things from my past and, sometimes, look at things in the future, fall into this evening journal.
When I began collecting more of my writing in notebooks, almost 30 years ago, I write on a wide range of topics every day, sometimes more than once a day. That kept going for about a decade, filling notebooks every day, running through about two or three every year. My habit slowed a bit when my children were born, as I wrote more things for them (in notebooks I saved for them.)
In the past decade, the habt has almost completely fallen away. Then, in recovery from yet another injury, I took it back up, began a habit, and have now returned to writing almost every day. But, this time, I found it helps me to have a theme about which to write for a few weeks at a time. Thus the need for the small Field Notes notebook: I needed a place to drop in quotes, funny things, observations, questions, and things that come to mind. When these no longer had a home in my notebooks and daily journals, I almost lost those, as well. Luckily, like the practice of drawing, doing some often makes me want to do more.
So, maybe this is all on long excuse–a reason for why I have not come back to post in a little while. I have been writing, and more for me than anyone else, and enjoying is far more than I had in the past decade. So, I will have to find a more careful balance. How to drop these thoughts in here, ones that have no other home.