Sometime earlier this year I read about the daily practice of “morning pages.” I’m not sure where I saw it.
Basically it means to start off the day by opening up a journal and just writing whatever comes to mind until you fill three pages. You don’t pay attention to spelling, handwriting, grammar, etc–you just write anything and everything as it comes up. This is different from a typical journal. It’s not about chronicling the events of the day or writing a story of any kind. The purpose is to just get your thoughts flowing.
I toyed with this idea for a few weeks and really liked it. I had just previously revamped my basement into a more functional room for all my hobbies and loved heading down there in the morning to write and meditate. Shortly after that, we had a flood in the basement that we didn’t catch for a couple of days–it made a huge mess and required a lot of cleaning to get the place back in shape. I didn’t go back to the habit.
A few weeks ago, I started the practice again and am finding it really useful. A big issue I have is being caught up in thoughts–they spiral around my mind in a series of flashes of brilliance or bouts of worry but never get pulled out into anything concrete. Taking the time to do this different type of brain dump has done two things for me:
1. It clears up my mind. I’ve already written about how I’ve started to write down all tasks, plans, lists, etc in my planner and my version of a bullet journal which has made me much more productive since I don’t spend all my time thinking about and trying to remember things. But now that the “to-do’s” are cleared out, instead it is concepts, ideas, and philosophies that are causing some brain blockage. The morning pages habit give me an outlet to spew out some of that mind clutter and makes me more efficient.
2. It takes small thoughts and develops them into something more complete. It starts with a quick sentence–just something that comes up. Normally it would just stop there, but now this process allows me to dig a little deeper.
I find it funny–you don’t even realize how much is there until you get past the top layer. I’ll start to write about a topic and think that it will be short, but once things get flowing so much more comes out. Journaling in an informal format like morning pages makes it easy to just let things naturally come out of my brain and onto paper. It really works as a tool to get to know yourself better.
I’m looking forward to seeing what else I discover as time goes on.