The Docsplainer

Oh, writing in my notebooks, hands down! I started somewhere around 1979, when I arrived in Ely, Minnesota that August for Outward Bound school and the staff gave us all a little pamphlet for recording our journey. I’ve lost that one in one of our two moves in the following couple of years, but I still have every other notebook I ever started along with hundreds, if not over a thousand, entries in an electronic journal. (I used Penzu for years, but have recently switched to Daily Notes in Obsidian.)

Journaling is great for starting second (or even third!) acts. I journaled like mad when I went back to school for my doctorate and again after my husband died. In 2015, I started a Teaching Journal in Penzu when I came back to that after a long hiatus, and I’m journaling now to support my third career, writing. Over the years, my diaries have evolved into a sort of Bullet Journal®️/commonplace book/nature journal/note-taking app/project-manager mashup that literally is my Second Brain.

I’ve used it to get through depression/support my therapy, to get sober, to grieve. I used it to cope with the Internship From Hell, to explore religion/spirituality and eventually Buddhist philosophy and practice, and to celebrate the joys of life for approximately 45 years. I’ve used it to flesh out ideas I was excited about for teaching. Now that I’m older (okay, old) and have accumulated some 50 or 60 notebooks plus hundreds of entries in an app, I use it for reflection and to support my writing.

Since 1981, I’ve recommended it to patients and students, and I’ll recommend it to you, too!

The Rains retreat begins soon for Buddhists around the world, and I have a dedicated journal on deck and ready to go (is that redundant?) July 30th to support my practice for the next three months. It has an Intentions page, in classic Bullet Journal®️style, with my goals and targets for the three months along with the other usual starter pages, because it is going to be my everything-in-one-place notebook I’ve recommended for people with ADHD since the mid-1990s. But it will be focused on the practice: The notebook is the color of monk’s robes to remind me, and I bought a bottle of ink (Diamine’s Pumpkin) and a pen (a bronze Lamy AL Star) to match. (I wrote about tools here.) Nuts, but as I always told students at the beginning of class, if we’re not having fun here, what are we even doing? And pens, inks, and pretty notebooks are fun.

Reference

Forte, T. (2022). Building a second brain. Atria.