"Pen and paper have always held true for me"
"Pen and paper have always held true for me"
By Mackenzie from the lovely road
by
fromIt can be hard to resist the siren call of our iPhone and the lure of digital media. My mobile device usually goes with me everywhere I go, sometimes to my consternation, and I admit I still have Gmail on my phone right alongside the Substack icon. I do enjoy using the Calm app which helps me with my almost daily meditation sessions.
Although I feel I've made progress on lessening the amount of time I spend on my phone and obviously there is room for improvement, there are still things that my brain stubbornly refuses to utilize my phone for. In particular, that is scheduling and/or adding things to a digital calendar and writing things on the Notes app of my phone.
It is interesting how intractable I am about these two things. It could be a generational thing, or maybe I'm just a throwback to an era where you literally wrote things down. Growing up, we always had a calendar up on the wall in the kitchen where birthdays and doctor appointments were written down in a scrawled hand. Even after I became an adult and had my own apartment after university, I still had a calendar on my wall and dutifully wrote down any important appointments. Now as a mother with children in school, there I am at my wall calendar writing down when picture day is and the much anticipated first day of school.
Every December, I look forward to picking and choosing a new calendar for the upcoming year in which I will write down all of our various minutiae. But it is our minutiae, and I enjoy putting it all down. I am particular about the calendar I choose, and I will definitely look at the preview pages on the back of the main calendar, just to make sure that it is something I will enjoy looking at for the next twelve months. One year, I had an Addams Family calendar where each month was a different original drawing of the family from cartoonist Charles Addams, which began in 1938. My current calendar is different places in England which for this month, is a photo of Oxford.
So, I definitely do not use a digital calendar and I don't use the Notes app on my phone. I write it down, no matter what it is, literally on paper. Grocery lists are always haphazardly written down on scraps of paper while any ideas that I have in terms of writing, or something I want to look up or read about, I write down in a small notebook that I keep in my purse. Sometimes my scrawl is slightly illegible as I am trying to write down my ideas as fast as possible before doing a school pick-up or dashing into the grocery store for example. This notebook is always with me, and I use it to write down anything, and I mean anything that pops into my head that I want to research or look into later. If you are wondering, my notebook has Sherlock Holmes on the cover, and it is one of my favorite things ever.
I have one other notebook that I keep at home that does not travel and that is used expressly for journaling prompts and book quotes. I am not a big journaler per se, but there are some lovely people here on Substack that I follow who hold monthly Zoom journaling sessions and I do enjoy participating in those and seeing what comes up on the page as I articulate my thoughts. In that same notebook, I will write down quotes from a book that I am currently reading that really resonated with me. This mostly applies to non-fiction, and I find that writing these words down in my notebook helps me to not only retain what I read, but also it is a way to look back and find useful information for an answer to a philosophical question that I am looking for.
I know that there are more ways that I could be less tethered to my phone, and I look forward to exploring ways to reduce my device use even more. But I really do love the fact that pen and paper have always held true for me, even as a little girl scribbling in her diary, to a woman writing down her thoughts and dreams in notebooks full of prose-leaning cursive handwriting. Some things may change but my enjoyment of the handwritten word never will.
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