Today we flew! Crow, or bakasana, is one of my favorite poses mostly because when I first saw Adriene demonstrate it and then turn to the camera and expected me, at home, to do it too, I was like “WTF, you want me to do that? But I’m a beginner!” But after a surprisingly short time I actually found that I could do it. Not well, mind you, and still today I am super shaky and fall over quite a bit, but it’s a posture I’ve gotten better at exponentially and, seriously, is there a better family of birds than the corvid? No.

This year, I’m getting more organized, which is something I say every year, but this year I bought something I’ve been kinda pining after for a while: a bullet journal. But let me be absolutely clear: I do not intend on doing the whole like key for tasks thing, moving them forward and backward and basically any of the actual bullet things. I just want a pretty notebook that I draw calendars and doodles in. And look at the start I’ve gotten to:

I actually just got the journal today, so I’m starting to fill it out in the middle of January which is making me feel some misplaced–but predictable–stress, but I’m determined to back fill the month! I had another planner that I got in November and used in December as a sort of test, but the paper is SO THIN that everything bleeds through. It was also a ringed binder where one can add more sheets to which I thought was a great idea for someone like me who would inevitably rip mistakes out and have ideas and want to add new things in, but it’s just too bulky–I couldn’t take it on our trip at Christmas, and I was bummed out about that because I wanted to take some notes while we were gone, so I think the portability of this notebook will be key.

Ultimately I want to use this to track my habits, especially writing, and keep track of appointments, but mostly as a sort of journal where I can mark down special things that happened. Less for thoughts and feelings and more for recording activities and, well, I guess my thoughts and feelings about those. I just want, at the end of the year, a lovely little book that sort of encapsulates 2019. So many little things happen to us and then they’re gone, especially, I think, in a world where we take so many photos but almost never print them out or even look at them again. We live through our lenses just to record moments we won’t revisit, and I want to find a way to circumvent that. Now that we have a printer, I think I’ll actually print out some photos and add them to my journal through the year too. So I guess it will be a sort of scrapbook too.

I don’t know if recording life is particularly courageous, but putting it out there that I’m starting this will, hopefully, hold me to keeping up with it.