To anyone who hoards pretty notebooks
To anyone who hoards pretty notebooks
Writers of various kinds have been known to have a pretty notebook collection that sits unused. There’s just something so alluring, so magical, about smooth pages and elegantly designed covers. They’re inspiring, we think, although somehow they end up being intimidating. I have a stack of them for dream journaling. Half are filled, half are empty. I kept buying them even after my writing slowed down. Was it related, having more blank books destined to be filled with new entries and my waning motivation to write those entries? I don’t know.
It reminds me of how I used to get gifts of art supplies as a kid. I loved making art, and I admired and coveted and was inspired by these special materials, but most of those gifts ended up going to waste. Sets of beautifully colored markers, oil pastels, fancy colored pencils in a case with erasers and sharpeners - I loved them with the reverent, serious love of a sensitive child. I had ideas for art all the time. But I always wanted to save those markers and things. I knew if I used them, I would use them up, and then I wouldn’t have them anymore. Whenever I contemplated using them, I felt this weighty responsibility to use them well.
I suppose I became a musician, instead of a visual artist, because that FOUTU (Fear of Using Things Up) isn’t so much of an issue with piano. You don’t have a finite amount of piano to work with. You can play it as long as you want, all day every day, and you won’t diminish the amount of piano at your disposal. I didn’t hold myself back from music the way I did with art.
When I felt like making a picture, I took out cheap watercolor paints or a bag of dingy broken crayons. I used those up like crazy, and I thought nothing of it. To justify using the good stuff, I needed to have a really special idea, and I needed to be sure I could execute that idea exactly as I had envisioned it.
So I saved the beautiful nice art supplies, and I probably made far less art than I might have, and eventually the glitter glue pens turned to sparkly rubber and the oil pastels dried up and crumbled. I was always disappointed to discover, when I finally decided to use one of my cool art supplies, that they had become unusable.
But at least I knew I hadn’t wasted them.
It’s not much of a consolation now.
I know, as an adult, that things are meant to be used. One way I know this is from having a refrigerator. When I open my refrigerator and survey its contents, I’m plotting to save every item from its looming fate as a soggy smelly thing in the trash can. Because there’s no saving food. You eat it ASAP, or it goes to waste. You can’t hang onto that avocado until the perfect moment to eat avocado has arrived. Avocados are a now or never kind of food. They won’t wait for you to be ready to eat them; when they’re ready, you better get ready.
Some foods have a longer shelf life (or refrigerator life) than others, but they all go bad in the end, and if you don’t make use of them, you’ve wasted your money. And what’s worse, you’ve wasted the resources that went into that food - the labor of workers, the water and soil and sunlight and time. Throwing away food makes me feel incredibly guilty. I’m one of those people who leaves leftovers in the fridge for a few more days after I’m sure they’re no good anymore, to delay facing the truth. I’m very committed to using up my food.
I did think I had outgrown FOUTU and become pro-using-things-up, in my conscious beliefs, at least, if not entirely in my heart. But then I returned to composing music. Writing music was a creative outlet I had discovered in my preteen years and had periodically dabbled in throughout my life, but I had never truly pursued it for more than a few weeks or months at a time. In the relative quiet of the first pandemic year’s doldrums, I heard the call again, and I felt compelled, not just to create one or two things, but to learn more deeply the art of putting sounds together. My first attempts immediately showed me that my fear of using up my resources is still a powerful influence on my actions.
Now, part of what I do in my work is to teach music to beginners. It’s a central tenet of my teaching philosophy that knowledge and skills are built, not by polishing and perfecting each example, but by making thousands upon thousands of attempts at the process. The attempts need not all be successes; it’s best, really, if most of them aren’t. That’s how learning works.
I do know that’s true, and I believe it. But putting that philosophy into action is HARD. At heart, I’m still a perfectionist, despite my professed rejection of that mindset. As soon as I started trying to write music, I found that I was so reluctant to put an idea down on paper, or my screen, that I spent ages futzing with notes on the piano before I notated even one phrase. And once I had written out an idea, or one iteration of an idea, I was beyond reluctant to change it. I suppose I knew I would feel that way, and perhaps that’s what was behind my hesitation to settle on an idea in the first place. I wanted so badly for everything I created to turn out to be good. As good as it could be, anyway.
Why wouldn’t I accept that not all of my attempts needed to be good?
I suppose I didn’t want to waste my ideas.
I couldn’t help feeling that, if I came up with a lovely melody, or a cool texture, or a satisfying harmony, I had to do it justice. That beautiful idea, I felt, deserved its best chance. It deserved to realize its fullest potential. Throwing it away by using it in a work that was ultimately merely a learning experience for me - it seemed somehow irresponsible, somehow selfish, that I would destroy a thing by using it up for no other purpose than my own edification.
Crayola still sells 8-packs of markers in “bold” colors. Had I ever used up my markers as a kid, I could have just gotten more. I could have used up a pack a week for the last thirty years. There are always more. But ideas…. Crayola doesn’t sell those. Each one is unique, and I don’t know where they come from or how exactly to obtain them.
But there will always be more ideas. And you can never waste an idea by using it. You can only waste it by hiding it away, preserving it for its perfect use, until it decays and crumbles to nothing.
Looking back with adult eyes, I see that I wasted those lovely gifts when I was a child. I thought I was respecting them, and the people who gave them to me, by preserving them for only the most worthy uses. But their purpose was to be used - not to be used perfectly, just to be used at all, to be used up. I denied them the fulfillment of that purpose because I misunderstood it.
And you! You are wasting those pretty notebooks. They aren’t holding themselves aloft, out of reach until the long arm of your most perfect creative work snatches them down into your grasp. They’re right there, on your shelf, and you can reach them right now. They’re for using. That’s why you got them. They’re pretty and perfect, not because they demand the prettiest and most perfect purpose, but just so that you can enjoy using them.
The pretty notebooks haven’t put that weight of expectation on you. You have put it there yourself, and those notebooks will help you to throw it off, if you would just open one and start to write.
