Many Ideas left in the inkwell

Property of Stormberry

Planning and preparation are great tools to make sure you get to do all you want. I love planning & preparing, and usually have calendars and lists and all sorts of stuff with this in mind. And it usually works... except when it comes to planning and preparing a blogpost. I think I have tried in the past, specially in 2012, when I was writing a post every single day. Wow, that was something!

I took part on a Philofaxy meeting at the begining of this month -  which I enjoyed like CRAZY! and everybody who has and loves filofax planners should seriously consider attending - and it was such an experience to show my system. So I was thinking about making a post about how I use my planner, and how have I've combined the bullet journal and the filofax system in one that pretty much works well, as well as showing a color-splashed, pretty hassle-free, free form, non-artistic spread. Ok, I work on them ONCE a year, and you could pretty much get the same thing just buying or printing out those inserts and that's all.

So I planned the theme, the idea, and even made the pictures for the post. LOTS of pictures. Really, like a huge bunch of them, so I had many, many angles and stuff to show, depending on how the text was going to turn out. And then... that's not what happened.

Life happened, that's what happened, and I was buried under a landslide of work and university homework, and preparing for lectures - because I'm one of those students that likes to read ahead of the class - and so the pictures are stored, along with the ideas, and I come here with new pictures - much less - and an etirely unstructured, different post idea. Like in the old days. Remember those?

Journaling is one of my favorite topics, in case you haven't noticed. That would be because I love journaling, and I love it because it's free. Of course the book costs money, and so the pen and the ink (for many years now, I only journal with fountain pens), but what I mean is that there is not set structure, like even the most free planning systems have. No keys, no rules, no blocks within the page to keep you organized, no indentation or color coding. Ok, I tend to write the initial "block" the same way (you know, the part with the date and so), but this has also changed through time a lot. There was a time when I always wrote it in Japanese (I don't speak Japanese, but I was learning and the date formula stayed in my brain for long), or always in French, and so. I have thought here and there to go Anaïs Nin and leave out the date and just write, BUT I actually need the dates because my memory is famously bad, and sadly I have encountered people in my life who have tried to gaslight me thinking I wouldn't know, because I don't remember. HA! Never underestimate a person with a journal.

Property of Stormberry

Journaling is kind of the other end of the planning and preparing. It is the summarizing and processing. There are many ways to do this too, and there is people that keep also many journals for different purposes. I usually have one journal, though for a while I've been also using a Simple Diary a friend of mine gave me, in which I either pick here and there a page at random, or look for one that has the kind of prompt I want to fill out - it's kinda funny to have a non-chronological diary like this. I also have a journal that's too... designed and thematic to be a real journal of any sort for me (I write sooo much and have soooo many thoughts and opinions, I just don't have time for top tens, favorite music of a whole page covered with a black butterfly), in which I only write in pencil, short and "cryptic", dark thoughts. Yeah, I have those too. It's like my punk-journal. No dates.

But these are like my "shot" journals, stuff that stays there through the years and, get attention, the-gods-know-when. Good, shot journals for the instant boost or unloading, or taking the edge of something. But my journal, MY JOURNAL - oh ho hoooo! - that's something else. Even if I don't write every day - which I don't - when I write, it's deep, detailed, and nearly forensic. I love that.

This year I also decided to start using my Witches's Datebook - a datebook I have gotten every year since 2012, if I remember correctly - also to record small notes on my mood or things that made me tick or made me smile. The idea was to start making a sort of lunar journal, which, yeah, not only I don't journal daily, I had no idea who could I make a spread for that in my planner. The idea was to record quite simply how I feel, so I could see actually how the moon and its phases affect me. In the end, well, you can see, I used it also to record stuff like a particular call from someone, a witchy virtual meeting, or just feeling like I really, really love someone in particular that day.

For two years now, I have decided to use these datebooks only to plan stuff that related to my personal or academic life. I wanted a work-free space, and so stuff like classes, exams, meeting friends and so on, got there. It was also on my bullet journal, mind you, but I also copied it there, specially because this datebook is my reference for stuff like astrological aspects to consider (Mercury Retrograde being major there, which starts tomorrow, by the way), and also the daily color. If you check many of my previous ones, most of them are quite blank, but recently they seem more full, and now... well, it feels like I need a wee bit more of space. :-) But then, for that, when the thoughts overflow, if I feel like I want to dissect them, I pull out my journal, uncap a pen - or two - and let the ink and the thoughts flow together.

So, in the end, I have a journal, and along with it, I have littl journal helpers that either aid in the process of refining the idea and shed the initial punch out of them, or they accumulate small bits here and there, so that later on I can wax poetry on this or that is so totally wrong/right about this, and what I think about it, and where the flaws in the logic are, and thus why I come to the well-thought conclusion... of whatever I conclude.

The point is, it's ok to plan & prepare, and heck! do it as much as you can! But when life throws a wrench into your gears, or you need to chillax a little or you just need to unload and let go and have a non-planned, non-prepared, just free flowing moment, don't beat yourself over it, and take any way, shape or form you feel like it. Scribble in pencil on a corner of your planner, type down a short note in your notes app, or use a journaling app, or take a picture and write a caption, or write nothing, draw a spiral on a post-it... express yourself, for yourself, in nay way you can connect.

That's the point.