Collect Your Thoughts: Get Yourself a Dirty, Ugly Notebook

Author’s Note: Second part in my rough draft of chapter two for Mildly Creative: 7 Ways to Lead a Life of Quiet Inspiration

The Fine Art of Catching Fireflies

During the summers when I was a boy, I spent many hours catching fireflies, luminescent little beetles that flittered about in the night air. Some evenings, with their wings a blur and their bodies aglow, the fireflies converted my backyard into a miniature light show.

To capture them, I used a very sophisticated device. It was called a mason jar. Once equipped, I’d run out the door and into the yard to track the flashing insects. They seemed to be everywhere, and yet zeroing in on any one of them could be a challenge.

If I spotted one glowing, I’d move in its direction, and then, just like that, it would go dim and I’d lose it in the darkness.

The trick was to be patient. If I waited long enough, it would glow again. With each passing flash, I drew closer and closer until the thing suddenly lit up right in front of my nose. Then, with the palm of my hand, I’d guide the tiny thing into the mouth of the jar.

Now, with the firefly in the jar, I could take a closer look. I could take it inside, examine it under the light, and peer at it through a magnifying glass. I could see that it had six legs, two large eyes, two antennae, two pairs of wings, and that its light source was in its abdomen. I could begin to understand it.

Catching Your Thoughts

Your thoughts are a lot like fireflies. They are many and they flitter about, they glow and go dim, and to get a closer look at them and begin to understand them, you have to catch them and bring them into the light.

And here’s the good news. To do this, you really don’t need anything more sophisticated than my trusty, old mason jar. In fact, a mason jar can be a good place to store your ideas, but I’ll get to that later. For now, all you really need is a notebook and an ink pen or pencil or whatever you wish (Crayons work too).

Your notebook doesn’t have to be fancy. My mason jar wasn’t made of special glass. It didn’t have to be clean or pretty. A dirty, ugly mason jar would have worked just as well. So why not get yourself a dirty, ugly notebook?

Don’t Get Too Fancy

You could buy a fancy journal with textured paper and a leather binding, but you might be reluctant to write in it. Fancy journals are so pretty when they’re blank.

But dirty, ugly notebooks are hard to mess up. You can scribble in them, draw in them, paste things in them, and write horrible, no good things in them. Nothing you put in them has to be profound or eloquent or even make sense, which means they’re just about perfect for collecting your thoughts.

Thoughts are Messy

Thoughts are not always pretty things. They’re often messy, misshapen and disjointed, vague and nonsensical. Waiting for them to fully develop could be an exercise in lost time. You have to jot down what’s there, even it seems silly or strange (or dirty or ugly).

Sometimes my thoughts are merely phrases. Sometimes they’re just words. Sometimes they’re circles or spirals or some other shape I can’t stop drawing. I don’t judge them. I just collect them. You should do the same.

Catch What You Can

But before I make you think you should get obsessive about this, don’t. You can’t catch them all at once. Don’t even try. You’ll make yourself sick. Catch the ones that catch your eye. Zero in on the ones that grab your attention. Follow the glow. Move in slowly. Guide them into your jar with the palm of your hand. Then take them inside to get a closer look.

Take a Good Look

The point here is to capture your thoughts on a page and examine them. You want to develop your ideas, question your beliefs, challenge your negative notions, and come up with new and better things to replace them with. And sometimes it’s dirty, ugly work. A dirty, ugly notebook can do the trick.

Set Them Free if You Choose

Also, whether or not you hang onto them is up to you. You’ve probably never heard that before. Almost every book I’ve ever read on keeping journals talks about hanging onto them. That’s why they call it keeping a journal, I suppose. But I have a confession. I almost never do.

I hang onto the things I want to hang onto, but I’m not much for clutter, so every now and then I rip the pages out or send an entire notebook to the recycling bin. I’ve gotten what I wanted out of them and I’m moving on. After all, I always eventually set those fireflies free. You can do the same if you like.

If You Need Things to Be Neat and Pretty, Buy Two Notebooks

If you find that you simply must have a pretty notebook, one that’s neat and filled with lovely thoughts and decorative ideas, then buy one of those too. Consider it an anthology of your thoughts’ greatest hits.

But please, please, please get yourself a dirty, ugly notebook too.

We’re about to get messy.