#347: The Notebook Pile
The strength to destroy our prized possessions
Despite the digital age, my life is marked by a trail of paper. Diaries, sketchbooks, scrapbooks, to-do lists, notebooks, post-its... All with different uses. All with sentiment attached.
But for two reasons I cannot continue to generate paper at the rate I currently am. Firstly, my shelves will soon bow and burst. Secondly, paper and the covers that hold it will eventually become waste. My conscience cannot cope with knowing that our planet is in crisis, yet I am happily pouring out feelings onto sheets and sheets of dead trees.
With the reflection of the new year still in my bones, I turned to my shelf of notebooks and started to sort through them, to decide what stayed and what had to go.
The most important thing to remember when undertaking such a task is to let yourself take time. You will get distracted by the things written (I did). You will feel overwhelmed by the volume and weight of your memories (yes, this happened too). You will wonder, at some points, whether you are really ready to let go (I considered this a little too late, a pile of torn up notebooks already on the floor).
Before I knew it my notebooks were sorted into piles. Those with space left to use; those so full of memories they earned their keep; and those to get rid of.
Admittedly, what ended up in the rubbish pile were only the diaries consisting solely of appointments. Do I really need to know what I was doing on a random Tuesday at 15:00 in 2017? Not really. Especially not when I also have journals containing my personal feelings from that year. If you were to weigh up the value of appointment times versus first-person accounts, it is clear which to keep.
Certain parts of these hardback diaries were recyclable, others weren’t. In a riot of paper-tearing that could only occur in the new-year-new-me spirit of the month, I tore apart the diaries and sorted the pieces. I felt a pleasure in returning these objects to their raw materials. My mind is clearer now.
So what about issue number two? The environmental impact. Do I make all my notes digitally from now on? Is that actually better for the environment, all factors considered?
For now my solution lies in refillable notebooks, namely Filofaxes. Notebooks that do not need massacring in order to ready them for recycling. Since I need only to replace the paper inside, there is much less waste. It is not perfect, but it is a start.
And so I addressed, in the best way I could, the issues associated with one of my favourite objects. I was reminded that owning things, even joyful things, comes with a certain weight. We cannot keep everything and we cannot keep buying everything. Not even notebooks.
