The little orange notebook

I carry a small orange notebook with me everywhere I go. It fits in my purse, survives the bottom of my bag, and has seen more airplanes in the past few months than I can count. It isn't fancy. That's the point.

There's something that happens when you put pen to paper. Something that doesn't happen when you type, or voice-memo yourself, or screenshot something you meant to think about later. Writing by hand is slow. And in that slowness, something loosens. It gets out.

I've learned to be intentional about it. I don't journal every morning at 6am with a candle lit and a five-step routine. But I am present when I do it. I notice when I need to write. When something in me is unsettled or overflowing or just worth remembering. That noticing is its own practice. Though I want more? A daily practice. Gratitude on the page every morning. I'm not there yet, but I'm working toward it…

And lately, I've been using my little orange notebook to look back. Not to dwell, but to see. Pages from two years ago describe a life I was quietly building in my mind. Places I wanted to go, the kind of work I wanted to do, the person I was trying to become. And somehow, almost without realizing it, I got there. Not because I manifested it in some mystical sense, but because writing it down made me take it seriously. It moved it from fantasy into intention.

That's the quiet power of a journal. It holds your past self accountable to your future self. It tells you: you said this mattered. Did you mean it?

But more than the looking back, the notebook keeps me here. Present. I write to release, to reflect, to remember. The little orange notebook is how I live intentionally.