Make it easier

It really doesn't always have to be so hard

Almost every year, in mid-August, I make my annual pilgrimage to my least favorite retail outlet (Walmart) and raid the school supplies section.

This may sound like a strange ritual, since I don’t have kids in school, but there’s a method to my madness.

You see, August is when I stock up on composition books. Yep—I’m talking about this old standby that you may remember from your school days if you’re in the US:

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

I bought one back in 2020 at a discount store thinking maybe I’d use it for something (“maybe” being the worst reason ever, but it turned out well!). I realized not long after that this humble little book that cost me maybe $2 was actually the perfect journal.

Why?

1. It’s cheap! Sometimes as cheap as 50 cents, but never more than $3.50 for a fancier one.

2. It’s humble. What I mean by that is that it’s not putting on airs and graces like so many journals do. I own some beautiful journals. More on those in a minute.

3. Aside from the tape that holds the whole endeavor together, it’s easy to recycle. (I’ve spent time tearing pages out of more expensive journals in the past to try to recycle them. It’s a pain.)

4. It’s not very bulky, so it travels well.

When I started journaling more in 2020, this is what I used, and it was indeed perfect, and the way I knew that was that I actually wrote in it.

As I mentioned, I own some beautiful journals. I bought them with the best of intentions. I was going to fill them with all sorts of poetry and prose and assorted bits of philisophy and other wonderments.

I’m here to tell you that, years later, most of them are still completely empty.

What happened (or, well, didn’t)? I’ll tell you, and then you tell me if something like this has ever happened to you: those journals were too beautiful to write in. Every time I look at them, I think of all those wonderful things I want to put in them… and suddenly nothing I can think to write is good enough to go in them. My handwriting certainly isn’t good enough anymore to grace their pages. The quality of the journal makes me feel like the quality of the writing and ideas that goes in them has to be at least as good. It has to deserve a place in those journals.

Self-judgment is one of the biggest blocks any of us face. It definitely wasn’t that I had nothing to write in a journal—it was that I could never think of anything that deserved such a lofty position. So they sit, waiting for the day I come up with the perfect thing. Odds that I ever will have been calculated at slim to none.

The humble composition book, on the other hand, poses no such barriers. It’s mostly intended to contain the thoughts of 7th graders who will probably destroy them before the school year is out (which is why some now come with plastic covers). It doesn’t care how special your ideas are, and neither do you, when you look at it.

In that way, the composition book is magical; it can hold absolutely anything, from teenage poetry to Nobel Prize winning ideas.

(Some people are a lot like composition books—if they’re not snooty, they can hold a lot more than they look like they can.)

So what’s up with my August retail excursion? Well, only during back-to-school season can you find really cool comp books. And Wally World is pretty much the only place that has them.

Here’s this year’s haul, with two stragglers from a couple years ago thrown in:

“But you just said the magic of the comp book is that it’s boring!” I sure did. But none of that magic is diminished by a fun cover, and it can be handy to identify the current one, since otherwise they’d all look the same.

Lots of places do now have versions of the traditional marbled or solid covers in different colors, and I have some of those, too. There’s no denying, though, that these are much more fun. Or that, at this point, I have too many comp books, but when you go through one every 4-6 weeks, you need reserves!

So why am I telling you all this? It’s so easy for us to get in our own way, even with the best of intentions. When I thought that “journal” had to mean an expensive blank book, I could barely get myself to use one. When I realized a comp book was better in almost every way, it suddenly got easier. So easy, in fact, that it was suddenly harder not to do it than to jump in.

There’s almost always something we can make easier for ourselves, with some underlying idea about that thing that’s getting in our way. Eliminate that idea, or find a good way around it, and you’ve just made it much easier to do the thing you want to do.

What’s your beautiful journal/composition book? Where can you make something easier for yourself?

Tell us in a comment below!