Bear With Me

You know those posts when people rave about something that’s been going on for a while as if it’s new because they’ve just discovered it? This may be that kind of a post for you, if you’re familiar with bullet journals.

If you aren’t, it’s basically an organizer. The system itself makes use of regular kinds of markings to indicate tasks, events, etc. But for me, there are two things that make bullet journals fundamentally different from the classic kinds of organizers I’ve bought at the Office Pr0n store* and then never actually used:

• You buy a plain notebook in your desired size and figure out the layouts yourself, based on what it is that you want to keep track of. You can have a calendar, or task percent bars, a ledger to track spending, a calorie tracker, and so forth – whatever it is you want to track.
• You decorate it: colored pencils, pens, paint, washi tape, with hand-lettering or stamps or patterning – there’s a zillion ways to go about it.

When I first heard about this, I have to admit, I was pretty dismissive of it. A quick Google of bullet journaling shows a large quantity of extremely beautiful, creative layouts that seemed to me to be so heavy on the inspirational quotations and trendy brush lettering that there wasn’t enough room for, you know, information, and it seemed to me that the point of it was to spend more time decorating the thing than actually using it. And there’s the trendy “#BuJo” hashtag. “Trendy” = uuuugh.

I think in hindsight that this was all probably a horrible attitude brought on by the inspirational quotes which, to a large part, make my skin crawl, perhaps due to overexposure in the workplace. ** And I’m probably definitely jealous of the artwork.***

But the bullet journal concept started because a person with autism (Ryder Carroll) needed to keep track of stuff (full story here), in a way that tied what he wanted to achieve with why he wanted to achieve it – that constant linking of what and why kept him stocked up with motivation. That story caught me: I think I’m probably on the spectrum, although I’ve never been diagnosed, and recently I’ve had ever more trouble trying to keep track of stuff, to the point of acute emotional distress. Plus, I am 100% ALL IN on the idea of the importance of why (see Simon Sinek’s “Start With Why”).

So what the heck, thinks I, I’ll try this out. I bought a notebook, came up with a rudimentary layout based on a really basic description of two-page layouts (so that the entire conceptual element – such as a week – is visible at once).

One-week spread

My layouts are laughably simple and amateur (as the photo attests), but I have to say, I am a convert. And I will tell you why. It is because my journal is my mental plot.

The Plot

In warfare, you need a plot. You need a map, or a chart, or something, where you can visualize all of the things you need to keep track of. Ideally, you mark up the plot with the things that require calculation (”is the enemy within range of my weapons? Am I within range of theirs? When will that radar contact be within visual range of my lookouts, so I can try to get someone to visually identify it?” “How close am I to someone else’s territory?”). Calculations and overlays are things that computers are good at producing on displays (and you can do it with pencils and some tools). So the trick is to let them do that, so that when you have one of those very important questions, you don’t have to waste time doing the calculation yourself. You just look and lo, there is your answer, on your plot.

Using a plot frees up your brain from these mundane, computer-friendly tasks, to do the things that the computers (or charts) can’t do: identifying patterns. Recognizing behavior. Using observation & intuition to tell a story that you use to make tactical decisions and to anticipate future needs & actions. Thinking about the “what-ifs”, especially “what if I’m wrong about this?”. If you are spending all of your time trying to do the math to figure out if you’re still positioned where you’re supposed to be, or within a weapon range, or whatever, you will forever be behind the problem, struggling to keep up. You’re going to miss stuff, and it’s probably going to be dangerous.

This has been exactly the problem that has been causing me so much distress. I have a lot to do – the work is complex and involved and I have to keep track of a zillion tasks, most of which cannot be completed without some kind of follow-up, which is yet another task. I’ve been trying to keep track of this mentally – no wonder I’ve been so extremely anxious about forgetting stuff. No wonder that, up to this point, feeling like I’m on top of my tasks list has filled me with the dread certainty that it’s only because I’ve forgotten something (and I almost always have). My brain is simply not wired to keep track of a large quantity of tasks like this, and I’ve been trying to force it to, and that has not been working out well for me. I’ve been missing stuff, and it’s definitely been painful.

My bullet journal is my plot. It is extremely good at holding lists of tasks. Moving that list out of my brain and into the journal frees up my brain to actually think about things and especially to be creative, which is something that the crushing need to track tasks – and the attendant anxiety – had up to this point killed in me.

My journal is pretty simplistic, but that’s because I’m trying to maximize the space so that I have room to write down my tasks. I write in something like 4-pt lettering and I will fill each of those day boxes completely full with tasks. So I don’t have room for full- or half-page illustrations or motivational quotes at this point and I’m fine with that. Other people do, and that’s just fine, too.

It’s All About Dat Art

So, on to the second point as to why I am a bullet journal convert: doctors and colleagues have been telling me, for years, some variant of “you need to write stuff down”. Which I’ve tried to do, but I would always misplace the list, or forget to look at it, and it was just a bunch of scribbles anyway, so it was not useful. How is a bullet journal different?

Four-week spread.  This makes sense to me, as I currently
live my life week-to-week.  The color change is related
to the change in the Kemetic Orthodox liturgical calendar,
going from the season of Peret (growing) to Shomu (heat).

Part of it is that there is now a system for categorizing and marking the types of entries. Plus, you design it for yourself, for your own goals: instant buy-in! But the REAL difference for me is in the art. Art is that great thing that ties together all other disciplines as an expression. You want to get to the top of Bloom’s Taxonomy in a heartbeat? Art is how you do it. Art is what keeps you coming back – at least, it’s what keeps me coming back, wanting to scribble and tweak and decorate, and keeps me looking at the journal.  My coloring is really basic, but it also makes me less likely to lose it: after all, I’ve put a considerable amount of work into inking and coloring the thing.

In Conclusion

I cannot overstate the effect that designing and decorating using this journal, as ludicrously basic as it is, has had on my anxiety level. I feel like a whole new person.

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* Staples, Office Max, Office Depot, whatever.

** And which probably explains my perverse love of demotivational posters.

*** I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts and have not really truly used it – at least not for painting – in 20 years, as is probably obvious. Some of the art I’ve seen in Googling about bullet journals is absolutely gawwwjus

Churchy Thoughts

A little bit of background for this post: I am Kemetic Orthodox, but attend a Protestant Christian church with my husband, who is evangelical Christian. I don't feel any particular pull towards Christianity, but I appreciate church time as a dedicated time to (usually) think religious thoughts. For various reasons that will go unnamed at this point, I'm not particularly integrated with my actual faith or its community. I'm kind of stuck between: I appreciate my husband's community, but I'm not really a part of it.

At any rate, when I go to church, most of the time there's something in the sermon or music that gets me thinking. Today, the pastor was talking about the "born again" experience as creating an entirely new person, and he was basically talking about how the old person shouldn't be confused for the new.

I was thinking, "don't mistake the ka for the ba." In KO, a person has multiple souls. The ka is (in our thinking) the personality -- that spark that makes you you, as a person in this lifetime. The ba is that eternal part of you - that timeless soul. It's important not to mistake one for the other, or to think that because of something you've done in your lifetime, that you're stuck with that as who you are. It's part of who you are, and always be so, but doesn't define the eternal you.

I also got to thinking about the shuwyt, or "shadow". I've been thinking about Ma'at a lot, lately, and it occurred to me today that She is the spark at the core of creation: a light that shines throughout all of the universe. the shuwyt is kind of like a keel or sail: the keel and sail help to orient a boat in a fixed or variable (respectively) relationship with the motive force. A shadow always stretches away from the light an an opposite angle from the light source; I've begun to think of the shuwyt like a sail or keel, that shadow of the self-of-you that wants to be in alignment with Ma'at helping to swing you around in the right direction.

I thought a bit about Apep: I thought of Apep as a serpent that wraps its coils around you, blocking off your view of Ma'at, and weakening the shuwyt. It takes strength -- such as in the form of Set or Sekhmet or Heru -- to do battle with this force.

Some of the music lyrics talked about the perfectness of God. Often, I rewrite the lyrics with a Kemetic bent as I go, and sort of "sing along" in my mind. Today I was thinking about how perfect Netjer is, but Netjer as a totality of all the Names. Each individual Name isn't necessarily perfect: how could They be? They're finite aspects of the infinite Whole. But all taken together as one community, They are Netjer and are perfect. This is a model of an idea that we humans, too, can't approach perfection unless we do it together, as a community. We never will reach it, because we're finite, but we can't go it alone.

Which makes it highly ironic, or sad if you think of it that way, that I feel myself so isolated from my community. I'm kind of stuck.

Another thought that occurred to me was that as opposed to the born-again Christian idea of being born again as a completely new person, a more Kemetic thought might be that you're not necessarily made completely new, but that your perspective is widened. That person that you were before, that person whom you may not want to be before -- you needed to be that person then in order to be the person that you are, as "ridden" by God, today. It would be analogous to walking a narrow, rocky path in bare feet: it hurts. The path is hard to follow. You stumble along the way. But a widened perspective reveals that there are gaping chasms on either side: it might still hurt to walk that path in your bare feet, but your widened perspective helps you to understand why you need to walk that path.

So I don't think of religious commitment (at least, my own KO religious commitment) as necessarily being a new person with a new identity. What it is is you becoming more fully the person who answers to your ren (your name, but in this case it's the word that your Parent spoke to make you). The ren was there all along.