It’s summer and hot.
July 2025
This is when I want nothing more than to stay inside with the fan going (and the AC turned down as much as my bank account can handle).
I get my room temperature herbal tea and all my books.
Not just any books. But all the books with any form of writing in them.
It’s time to sort, categorize and rip.
A long time ago I used to set aside a morning or an afternoon for this process. I would have so much writing spread across so many journals.
Now I do it in shorter sessions – like an hour to an hour and a half. Usually 2 or 3 times over a month. When I’m spent in the afternoon, there is nothing better than putting on the pajama banks, collecting the books and getting in bed for an hour or so.
In the last 5 years or so, I’ve gotten into a yearly rhythm. There isn’t as much to go through, so I can do it in smaller chunks. Plus, there (luckily) has not been a lot of heavy stuff in my life (on top of the world being crazy but that’s now just the air we breathe.) I don’t want the mundane stuff to sit around that long and I’ve found that when I’m journaling, I’m mostly complaining. I don’t want that on my shelves and in my bags for long.
I don’t read all the pages. I usually just skim and see if anything pops out (they are usually 5X7 or smaller so this doesn’t take long.) Not as much pops out as it used to but there are usually a few things I want to remember or write about later.
The best part is the ripping out of the pages as I get through them. I think of it as “DONE. PROCESSED.”
Once I have the pile, I will rip them up into little pieces and put them in the garbage can. Sometimes, I’ll only let a few at a time pile up and walk them over to the garbage. I just let it flow naturally. Very rarely, but sometimes, I will let a larger pile build up. Throwing them out feels so freeing, like moving the old energy and stories out of my life.
Always with me on this is my planner since I keep the important things I want to read/remember daily in it (sometimes I have one of those.) As well as my current journal and my quote book. The journal is for writing stuff that needs to go to the computer.
At the end, to tell myself to enter into the world again, I will go back onto the computer, to add any idea to a to-be written about list from the back of the current journal.
This time around I had a journal with pictures I was going through and decided to keep the pictures. I always save any of the notebooks with extra pages. I will use every last page. I’m more apt to grab a pretty journal that doesn’t have all its pages to take with me out and about than one that is full. So this keeps me remembering as I go about my day, that I write. More than just notes for life and work.
I have (from my 40 minute bed session on Monday):
- 1 quote from myself in my quote book (green leaves)
- 1 blog post idea moved to the spreadsheet on my computer
- 1 additional declaration added to my 6 lines of declarations in my day planner (black book)
- 2 almost empty journals with all the written pages torn out and trashed (3 total as I did one on Sunday)
- 3 questions that I put in the front of my day planner (with the declarations)
- 8 really nice pictures trimmed from the pretty journal to use in my collaging or in notebooks later
This always re-focuses me on what I really want and gives me the check-out time I need. No mid-year check-ins or writing needed. Just mining the stores for the good stuff.
I used to dread throwing it all out. Now I relish it. What would I want my legacy (written down) to be if I were to be gone tomorrow? I don’t want all the mundane journal entries, just what I believe to be the best of what encompasses me.
That’s how I internally organize myself.