Although I use my iPhone to organise my life and the various goings on with my kids, I usually have a paper diary on the go too. There’s something about the act of writing something down that solidifies a thought in my consciousness in a way that is unachievable with an app. The process of picking up a pen and putting it to paper to commit thoughts into words in a tangible form is an act of creativity. It feels so much more human to write rather than type.
I use the MD Paper Notebook Diary. I’ve been a loyal MD Paper Notebook fan for around a decade so it feels natural to follow suit with my diary. Aside from habit, there are many good things about the diary for me:
The paper quality. It’s smooth and lovely to write on with ball pen, ink and pencil.
I like the format. It’s split between monthly planners spreads and notepaper.
The monthly view leaves a generous blank space that borders the calendar. I like using this space for extra notes, thoughts, stickers etc. I like how they “frame” a month.
I like the simple clean presentation of the book. I like the binding and the blind embossed logo.
Supplied with label stickers to help with organising and filing.
It’s reasonable and great value for money.
While I am on the subject of handwritten diaries, I want to mention Mary Gordon’s brilliant essay “ Putting Pen to Paper, but Not Just Any Pen to Just Any Paper”. It was published in 2001 in an anthology entitled; Writers on Writing: Collected Essays from the New York Times. Her essay not only resonates on many levels with my thinking on handwriting as as act of creativity and mindfulness, but it encapsulates so many thoughts that I find difficult to articulate.
“Writing by hand is laborious, and that is why typewriters were invented. But I believe that the labor has virtue, because of its very physicality. For one thing it involves flesh, blood and the thingness of pen and paper, those anchors that remind us that, however thoroughly we lose ourselves in the vortex of our invention, we inhabit a corporeal world.”