Most Journals Never Get Past Page Three

I have a drawer full of notebooks with three pages written in them. Maybe four, if the week was a good one. It used to embarrass me a little, like proof I couldn't follow through on anything. Then I actually asked a few people about their own journals, and it turns out almost everyone has the same drawer.

Here's what I've come around to: the page doesn't care how far you get. It's not a scoreboard. A journal that gets opened once a month for three honest sentences is still doing exactly what it's supposed to do, which is give you somewhere to put a thought down so it stops rattling around in your head at eleven at night.

I keep one of our Every Chapter Begins with a Blank Page journals out on the counter, not tucked in a drawer where good intentions tend to go to die. Having it in plain sight means I actually pick it up between pouring the coffee and walking out the door, even if all I write some days is one line about something that happened.

Have you ever noticed how much pressure we put on a blank page before a single word is even on it? Like it's already judging us for what we haven't said yet. I think that's backwards. A blank page has no opinion about you at all. It's just paper. Whatever you're worth, you walked in with that part already settled, long before you picked up the pen.

So some mornings my entry is a full paragraph. Some mornings it's "slept badly, made the coffee anyway." Both count. The ritual isn't in the length, it's in showing up to the same small act again tomorrow, which is really the whole idea behind slowing down on purpose instead of letting the day run you over before 7am.

If you've got a notebook somewhere with three pages in it, I'm not going to tell you to go fill the rest tonight. I'll just say three pages is further along than a closed book ever gets, and that counts for something too.

Choose to be kind. Choose to be grateful. Choose to be happy.

— Nina of GiaNina Collective