Years ago, when I was as green as baby kale, I worked for a small, feisty and effective arts organization.
My boss was a Daytimer day planner devotée. The use of a Daytimer was institutional catechism for the staff, de rigueur at all times.
So I bought one, though it was expensive as hell, given the household budget of a young married couple with a kid on the way.
That was likely why I bought it. I needed agency over my own time, not simply in my job, but in my new life as a fledgling professional, an unseasoned mother-to-be.
My Daytimer became my existential compass, everything I needed it to be. I tended it carefully and followed its listed obligations like a Catholic school girl which I never was, but somehow, essentially, still am.
For many years it charted or--more honestly--reported my zigzaging life course.
Till one day, my Daytimer, with its ten-years' plus of monthly data was gone. Gone, stolen from the trunk of my colleague's car while we were at a mass at the nation's largest cathedral.
There's a Zen koan if there ever was one.
Disillusioned, I switched to cheaper models--snappy, spiral-bound versions, tacky and insubstantial, like a slicker in a snowstorm.
Then--the promise of the bullet journal! I'm late to trends, but still! So I poured my Kool-aid into a tall glass. And ordered one.
I knew I could do all I needed to do in order to make it turn my life around as it promises to do.
But--it hasn't.
Recently, after leading a large, regional meeting I tried to set the date for our next one.
But I had no dates that far ahead. That's what a bullet journal is like. You create your own future, six vague months at a time, painstakingly mapped out in your hand with your own colored pens.
And that's all I had at that meeting--six color-penned-in months.
And I went home feeling sadly that me and my bullet journal had to break up.
It had been fun. But had it been fun, really?
Even with the Bullet Journal Handbook--think The Joy of Sex for day planners--which told you how to bullet journal, I was left wanting.
On top of that, the Bullet Journal handbook was a bit bossy, maybe even scoldy.
It was like having a boyfriend who says he likes you a lot. Yet he would like you even more if you just did this and this and this with your life. And if you had been a young Camp Fire Girl like I was with a hell of a lot of earned beads sewn onto my Camp Fire Girl bolero, you did try hard to do this and this and this. In order to better myself. In order to better my life.
But when was good, good enough?
As it had happened, my bullet journal arrived in the mail crushed, misshapen. I am of the "I can fix it!" mentality and since the bullet journal was supposed to fix me, I smoothed the wrinkled pages, put bricks on the creased bound covers. And waited. Waited for it to make me cool, good, efficient.
But right now, waiting isn't making any of us cool, good or efficient. Our overheated demented monarch is still at the national gas stove. The argot of veiled and recalcitrant racist rhetoric hasn't been quenched. Flames of hate are still being fanned by jingoism that cheapens what it means to be a patriot.
I expect the weeks ahead to be grim. Waiting to adapt to the unknown when the unknown is so far ahead feels lazy. Honestly, it feels insincere.
So--I set aside the eye-catchy, Etsy-worthy attempt of my bullet journal.
I ordered that old work horse, a Daytimer.
For what it's worth, that's my own to-the-barricades plan.
But it may be worth more than it seems. Because I want a plan and a strategy that I have already known will optimize what I can prioritize and what I can do. In seminary studies that was what distinguished theory from praxis, talking from doing, observing from acting.
And a day planner only make sense if you step out of the planner and into the day.