2002-08-03 - 2:40 p.m.
This is an entry written for the Random Acts of Journaling collaborative.
What is the point of a bottom drawer?" I question Kathleen. "To save things for the future," she says promptly.
What would I put in a bottom drawer if I had one?
Behind the scenes at the Museum, Kate Atkinson (p. 278)
I was in my early twenties when I bought the red spiral notebook, around the time of my birthday in November, feeling some compulsion to write about the changes that were coming at me too fast to assimilate. Although I had written in journals, at this point I was not in a place where my own thoughts were any comfort: sometimes we spin in the same tired circles. So after filling a few pages, I ripped them out and the red notebook sat unused for a few months. Then one winter night, as I huddled on the floor in front of the heater in my cold little house, trying to think of reasons to live, I took the notebook out again.
On the first page I wrote: Notes To Myself, (because I liked the Hugh Prather book of the same name) and the first page contains this inscription: In lonely outrage we must quit these paths of quiet desperation.
And then I captured this beautiful description of lateral knowledge I found in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:
"In a laboratory situation, when your whole procedure goes haywire, when everything goes wrong or is indeterminate or is so screwed up by unexpected results that you can't make head or tail out of anything, you start looking laterally.... a word....used to describe a growth of knowledge that doesn't move forward like an arrow in flight, but expands sideways, like an arrow enlarging in flight, or like the archer, discovering that although he has hit the bull's-eye and won the prize, his head is on a pillow and the sun is coming in the window."
This idea was like the door opening a crack into my dark room, and became a part of my fundamental understanding of how I could live in the world. It helped to know that there was somewhere else to find joy besides where it was supposed to be. That my life could be something entirely different if I was open to the opportunities it presented.
The notebook grew slowly but steadily over the years. It became the repository for anything that inspired me: words, quotations, excerpts, poems, lists, lyrics, clippings, pictures. My collected wisdom. A look through the yellowing pages is like a tour through the history of my intellectual passions and discoveries: Oriental wisdom, feminism, awareness, creativity, mysticism, nature, voluntary simplicity, artists and writers. In time the red notebook was joined by the black and yellow and blue notebooks. And while a few entries in these notebooks express ideas I've outgrown, most of them have become the building blocks of my personal philosophy. I find myself turning to them again when I need to be reminded of what I find most worth cherishing.
What could I really save that would be of use in the future? If I had to narrow it down to what would fit into a drawer, I would choose a small, motley pile of notebooks. I fully expect that I will be pulling the red notebook out of my bottom drawer when I am ninety and remembering that I can still expand my expectations of life. Remembering that life is about finding the courage to make your own happiness.
And maybe I won't need the notebooks to remind me. Maybe saving things for the future is a contradictory concept, because it is human nature to weigh the future down with all the baggage from the past. But I'd still keep my notebooks in the bottom drawer if I could. And a pen. Because wisdom is always a work in progress.
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