In March of 2023, I was gifted a bullet journal and instructed to learn how to use it so I might pass that knowledge on to my sister, who was, of course, the gift-giver. My long-distance partner’s visit had just ended and I was eager to fill the void of their absence with a flurry of productivity and journaling.
This gift set in motion a series of events which would prove to be fairly life-changing in the intervening almost-a-year.
While doing my research, I made notes in Notion about what functions I wanted this special customizable journaling system to serve, what my intentions were, what I would be capturing and what I’d try to do. I added some fun ones like a reading and a gardening log, as well as a few pages devoted to ritual and prayer. I wanted to try stuff out, and really lean on the concept of daily, simple, brief check-ins to keep things in motion. I immediately liked the simplicity of existing systems and seeing peoples creative adaptations, as well as the enjoyable, practical nerdiness of keeping a table of contents and hand-numbering each page. I loved inscribing tiny numbers in the corner squares of 10-20 pages at a time.
What turned out to be the biggest game-changer for me, other than the simple, beautiful fact of consistently looking at something every day (for a while anyway) and being reminded of stuff that me from the previous few days considered important enough to write down, was the habit tracker, something I decided to add primarily to make my occasional core exercises more of a specific daily thing.
I was also struck by the rightness of starting new habits not in January, when us and the rest of the animals are just trying to survive the winter, but around the time of the spring equinox, not even near the start of a month, and not on a Monday. In fact, the delight of embracing all the arbitrariness that fills our days made it that much more satisfying to give myself full permission to start something new just any time, and see how it goes.
Making these wallpapers, a new one on or around the first week of each new month, was part of the ritualizing and habitualising that helped me start to crave my daily exercise-stretching combo, develop and enjoy my meditation practice enough to find myself worrying I’ll spend too much time meditating and let the day slip by, and sink my teeth into journaling, processing and thinking-on-paper processes so much that I’ve made an art (and design) of it. Finding and collaging images that inspired me, without much thought at all, grabbing pixels by chance, when I saw them, each of which somehow created feelings I wanted to experience more of in me, was the more arduous, time-consuming first step of making a wallpaper. The easier part, totally restful and mostly done on a phone while reclining, was piecing the images together. Collage is one of my favorite mediums, and whether its digital or 3-d, it’s hard to express the satisfaction I get from floating bits of image around, trying to bring disparate things into some kind of cohesion with each other. Whether it all fits perfectly or not, there always is an attitude or certainly a feeling which arises spontaneously from the combination of all the elements in the picture, a picture which only cuts into focus through trimming away distractions, narrowing in on the best bit as well as those that fit each other best, and frequently taking the crucial step back needed to see the whole picture. I love that collage, in its whole, messy, process-form, is just as much about what is cut away as the bits you keep and glue down.
