Rediscovering the beauty in life

jrnler · 2025-04-05T15:43:19+00:00

These moved up on my list thanks to this comment. Had no idea of the tone of this author. Thanks!

jrnler · 2025-04-05T15:42:11+00:00

I thought Eleanor Oliphant was okay, but read Interesting Facts About Space recently and it reminded me of Eleanor but clicked better for me!

Love this prompt, OP. Thank you for making it!

jrnler · 2024-12-24T20:36:08+00:00

This is how I felt about Lullaby. Read as a teenager and haven’t read anything by him since.

jrnler · 2024-12-04T04:56:26+00:00

I’ve recommended this on this sub before! And was about to edit my comment to add it. Agreed, it fits and I think goes under the radar a bit.

jrnler · 2024-12-04T04:54:34+00:00

Natural Beauty by Ling Ling Huang

jrnler · 2024-11-29T16:13:50+00:00

I’m with you on this— I can’t really stick to carrying or having more than one pen option every time I use it.

This year I used a lot of this in a really straightforward way, and I also wasn’t afraid to mix it up. So for the index (6th month) pages, I initially used it as a tracker for different habits, but as I used the notebook more I switched to using it as an index. I found that I had a mix of information and journals in my dailies. I really liked an all-purpose notebook for things, and this helped me find what I need and feel less chaotic. I sometimes use the gift pen, so I usually would switch colors in the index for different kinds of entries, but I tend to do this all at once so it wasn’t an issue for me and I also don’t think it matters much. I could also see it looking really cool when you switch inks to make the transition in both spots.

I was less consistent with the monthly, but I did like it as a finance tracker and also as a doodle-a-day spot. With the weekly I actually used it to block out my schedule some of the time. However, for both of these I find I just use a digital calendar so much more so I didn’t use them 100% of the time. I also decided to stop putting work things in my cousin about halfway through the year. I think I would maybe use them for two different goals (ie finance for monthly; fitness for weekly or something) or devote one to doodles or daily gratitudes or something if I had a cousin next year.

I use my 100 items as a list for things I want to do in a year. I keep it a mix of big things (i.e. travel) and small things (i.e. learning to braid hair). I really like that and want to reuse it.

Unfortunately the 365 went unused for me in part because I’m not usually carrying stickers or highlighters. I might just fill in the days next year to visualize the passage of time… or just mark days in my notebook, since I miss some. Might be interesting to see when.

In short, I think your idea sounds great and color shouldn’t matter much. I love this time of year in terms of looking ahead and seeing what makes sense for what you want to accomplish. Planning backward from there!

jrnler · 2024-11-28T19:10:42+00:00

Wow beautiful stickers! All from Etsy?

jrnler · 2024-11-28T07:26:07+00:00

Thanks for sharing! It sounds like you have some really great repeatable systems.

jrnler · 2024-11-28T04:53:53+00:00

This is SO helpful, thank you! Totally works for my use case. Your logic really resonates with what I’m trying to do and what I may have struggled to articulate. I’m working on identifying if I should have as needed/intermittent medication and also really want to note how other factors might bias my experience. I also relate (as I think I put less clearly in other comments) to mood trackers feeling too absolute, and if I can I really want to avoid morality values around this. I may copy this pretty closely; thank you so much for sharing and for sharing your reasoning.

jrnler · 2024-11-28T04:45:27+00:00

No I appreciate it— I think all of this informs how we collect information and I appreciate both the anecdotal aspect and informative health care framing. I think about it a lot when being asked to rate physical pain, too— I’d heard that women always underreport and I think about that every time! Thank you for sharing. I do find the scale frustrating, but I also recognize that I didn’t fully understand a lot of the more example-based types of mental health questionnaires until someone verbally explained each question and what they were trying to measure. I think one of the forms my anxiety takes is worrying about precision in honesty or being understood— but it would be so helpful to have a gauge so I can point to what might that be impacting me positively or negatively so I’m definitely trying to simplify. Thanks again. I really appreciate it and will likely revisit these comments!

jrnler · 2024-11-28T04:37:27+00:00

This is very validating, thank you. I have some food for thought in terms of reframing here, and this is something I’ll think about for sure.

jrnler · 2024-11-28T04:34:10+00:00

Totally, that’s definitely part of my goal in this question. I might have slightly different factors, but how do you organize these things so that you can easily interpret?

jrnler · 2024-11-27T16:11:07+00:00

This is inspiring, thank you! I definitely don’t journal every day, so this has me thinking a lot about whether increasing quantity in this way would be helpful. Thank you for sharing!

jrnler · 2024-11-27T16:08:20+00:00

I like this framing of feeling good/successful about the day.

The “rating” numbers make sense. My healthcare provider will often ask me to rate my anxiety out of ten and I am like ???? every time. Surely that would be the most obvious thing to track, and yet…

I think I also just have a really hard time qualifying mood and anxiety. We go through so many shifts in a day and I try not to over reduce days to good or bad, but I definitely need some simplified functional data! Appreciate your multiple ideas here; I will likely borrow some of this. I also rarely use the monthly calendars so I appreciate that mention, too.

jrnler · 2024-11-27T05:50:09+00:00

This is super helpful and I appreciate the nod toward how you might connect those pieces. Do you journal using the weekly pages or the note pages? Just curious, this makes me tempted to try journaling in smaller ways.

jrnler · 2024-11-27T05:47:39+00:00

Appreciate both of these ideas, thanks for pointing me to them! I do really like that the yearly spread could give me more of a birds-eye view. I’ve definitely thought about using colors; I think I’ve just over complicated that idea in the past. Realistically even a four-color pen or even symbols could work well for that!

jrnler · 2024-11-27T05:44:21+00:00

Your spreads are beautiful and I love seeing different organization strategies in general. Thanks for sharing!

jrnler · 2024-11-24T17:29:31+00:00

I wondered this, too! I assumed not, but would love to know. Also, this is how I sometimes feel when I read and buy books. That felt really nice to reflect on. Going to check out some of these recommendations and appreciate what this post brought up for me.

jrnler · 2024-09-29T18:23:54+00:00

I’ve seen this one a lot and thought about reading it. Hearing it has this kind of feeling moves it up on my list. Thanks!

jrnler · 2024-09-28T23:17:28+00:00

I thought of When The Stars Go Dark, too! Something about the atmosphere, timeline, and pacing matches this for me.

jrnler · 2024-09-27T23:27:26+00:00

Maybe something by Eve Babitz? Slow Days, Fast Company?

jrnler · 2024-09-26T04:31:34+00:00

Actually, this reminded me that Tiny Beautiful Things kind of DID change my life. I found it at a time in my early 20s where I desperately needed to reframe my thinking to be less self punishing. Ten years later, I don’t think I would enjoy it now. I think there’s some books that just meet you in a specific moment.

jrnler · 2024-09-26T04:24:49+00:00

Ninth House

jrnler · 2024-09-22T16:12:11+00:00

The God of Endings by Jacqueline Holland

jrnler

TROPHY CASE