I'd kill a thousand trees if it meant my happiness

I have a goal in life to have a bookshelf jam packed with full notebooks.  I love notebooks.  They’re the kind of thing I like to buy when I’m having a bad day, or if I’m feeling stressed about something.  They’re full of freedom.  You hold one and imagine all the words you’ll fill it with, the memories it will hold, and the stories you’ll tell.  It’s like an optimistic piece of your future.  No matter what you fill them with, good feelings of bad ones, they’re going to make for a great read sometime in your future.  A filled notebook is better than any photo album.

I was looking through one of mine today.  A lot of it’s boring, filled with old lists and scrabble scores.  But, I’ve written some stuff that’s a lot of fun to go back over; the kind of things that come out when I really let my pen run away from me.  Here’s an excerpt:

I saw the heart of an aging man.  I saw it first in his smile, broad and creased like an old oak tree.  There was a beauty undefinable within it.  I saw it next in his hands, leathery and worn.  They glowed a dull luster, beyond the scope of the human eye.  When I saw the heart of an aging man it far outshone my own.  And, though I wished him all the best, I saw him later the same week.  His eyes were shut, his hands clutched, and his heart was gone.

That’s the kind of stuff I like to go back and re-read the most.  They don’t come out often, but I would love to have an entire book with paragraphs like that, little snapshots of my mind coming out through these curious representations.

I’ve got a long way to go before I get there.  Right now it seems to be taking me well over a year to fill up an entire notepad.  Though, to be fair, I have three on the go.  One I write in nightly, which is a new occurrence, and is filled with whatever thought shines most brightly about my day.  A second I use for lists and whatever I might need paper for, but this is also the one the above quote comes from.  The third is a smaller one that will fit in my pocket.  Every once and a while I’ll be lucky enough to have a nice thought land in that one, but for the most part it gets filled with boring lists as well.  It seems boring lists haunts much of my life.

I try to walk around with a pen and a notebook as often as I can.  What I don’t do is tell my brain to keep coming up with creative and interesting things to write.  That’s the real ticket.  That’s what makes paper worth coming back to read.

Comments

[Amanda]

"A filled notebook is better than any photo album"...See and I am all about "photos albums and iphoto albums mean more to me than notbooks". Interesting. Again, thats why you are meant to do what you do, and vice versa.

[gs]

Eli, you need to travel. Make some coin, and save it, go visit Amanda, she will take you places and show you things that will make you never put your pen down.