It’s going to be less than a month to 2016. Everyone is bustling like busy bees, gearing up for Christmas and New Year while here I am at Starbucks outlet in a nearby shopping mall, thinking of what to do on a fresh page of my journal. I have been chronicling my encounters on my journals since I was 7 but this is my first time that I feel so committed to engage something inspirational and wonderful on this particular journal every single day. Thanks to my Hobonichi.
Two years ago, I took a gap from writing, be it for school or for journal because I did not have the courage to continue. To get out of this distress, I went to Tumblr and Instagram to reblog, like and comment #studyblr posts and fanarts of my favourite shows. It was all purely coincidental when I found a post from a Tumblr user expressing his/her own chronicle of the day through drawings on her journal page. So I saved the tags #journals and #hobonichi and followed a few related people on Tumblr for future use.
The posts kept coming in for the next couple of days and they gave me a source of motivation to do expand my writing craft until one day, something clicked me.
Better buy this Hobonichi planner before I go ‘hysterical’.
By the word ‘hysterical’, I mean writing in places that are not meant to be written. Worse come to worst: my Facebook.
I got my Hobonichi in mid-December 2014. Its Tomoe River paper is so smooth to write that I do not even have to worry about the ink smudges. However, I was worried that I might do the same routine like what I did in my previous journals: writing my encounters for the day, stopped halfway and leaving the pages empty until who-knows-when. It came to realisation while writing half of first page on Hobonichi.
Journal is not solely for writing purposes. Ignore the ones you read in Meg Cabot’s Princess Diaries. Journal does not have its own format and it owns no one except you, the owner. Your journal is your life partner. Plethora of scribbles, doodles, drawings, book reviews, film critics, pieces of newspaper articles, ticket stubs, quotes, emotions, coffee and tea stains also express your daily experiences. Use them to engage your conversation with your journal.
My new and current notion on Hobonichi really helps me to drive my motivation to continue writing and unleash out my creativity. Whenever I have school and work meetings, I use my Hobonichi more often than the usual OneNote app from my iPhone. I have plans to order the 2016 edition of Hobonichi before Christmas. But for now, I continue to communicate with my Hobonichi before it runs out (of pages).
You can order Hobonichi Techo 2016 edition here. More details are available on the website.
