Morning pages - the ritual I did not know I needed
A small post, about an equally small habit I started a few days ago.
I lately came across the introduction of The Artist's Way, written by Julia Cameron more than thirty years ago. The book, its promises and its various introspection exercises did not evoke anything special to me.
But something else did: what the author describes as a pair of fundamentally important habits to cultivate creativity and help it grow. Morning pages, and the artist's date.
The artist's date really is just taking alone time to enjoy a contemplative and creative experience. It is described as making room for something insightful you wanted to try - for a few hours each week. Visiting an interesting place, enjoying nature, and so forth.
The potential benefits of such an exercise did not surprise me. I think it's something I've always done for the majority of my life. And I suspect most people do - how strange would it be to never indulge in some reflection or enjoyable thinking at least once a week ? The biggest difficulty here is to be alone with your thoughts. Fortunately, I am profoundly at ease with my own mind (that's a special kind of boasting, that I can enjoy by myself too).
The morning pages were vastly more intriguing. Dozens of blog and news posts on the web already describe the practice and its potential benefits. Apparently, this was a even a social media trend at some point - so I'll just summarize it in one sentence: morning pages are three pages of free and spontaneous (physical) writing you do every morning. It's not journaling. It's not structured, or clean, or even supposed to be read again.
It's literally dumping your brain's content (or as I prefer to phrase it, a kind of violent bout of thoughts vomiting) on a few spreads of paper and then go on about your day without ever looking at them again (although you can - just don't expect much meaning). I love writing. I love journaling too, but I was very sceptical of the concept. How can unstructured scribbling can help you foster growth, creativity, or even make your day lighter ? When I need reflection, I plan and I analyse. I think deeply about what's going well and what's going wrong. I draw conclusions and I try to act on it. Self-help 101. Me engineer ape. Me thinks.
I never realized this exact reasoning can be a source of problems too.
Heck, January has been a month of testing ! Tracking my routines, using pomodoros again with great success. I thought, why not try this too, just for the sheer fun of writing stuff on paper ?
The very first morning pages surprised me, for I expected I'd have nothing special to write about other than my habits regarding work and Lampyre - the usual content. But instead, it's like I took a throw on a dam wall with a pickaxe and made an irreparable crack. Words started flooding because morning pages lack structure or goals. Feelings, questions, remarks to yourself. Ideas naturally link to others and when you think you have nothing left to say, you excavate more insights you needed off your chest (nothing even traumatic or depressing - just old mental stuff and ranting you were not even noticing anymore).
To keep up with the watery metaphor, Obsidian and the bullet journal let me observe and direct the flow of my thoughts. Morning pages feels like mucking out the sludge accumulating in my mental rivers. You can't see the immediate or exact results, and you're not extracting pristine insights from the mud. But a bit of irresponsible word jotting makes you really realize how resourceful your mind is and how messy true creativity should be. It feels like the polar opposite of perfectionism and I much needed that pinch of perspective in my life.
I'm pleasantly surprised by the effects of this little routine and I'll keep it alive for as long as I'm enjoying it, filling irresponsible amounts of pages with brain mess (I do have an unreasonable thing for notebooks filled with longhand written materials, HELP). Maybe it'll become obsolete or anxiety-provoking at some point, who knows ? We'll see if it survives the hardships of time as well as the bullet journal does.