A number of months ago, I bought a brand new moleskine journal. I purchased it with the intent of unwrapping and filling it up without reservation. (For years, this brand and style has been my medium of choice for writing, and I love having a collection of uniform volumes to contain my more personal thoughts, notes, prayers, memories and ideas.) My previous moleskine wasn’t quite full, but at the time, it felt like life was entering a new chapter and it seemed like a good time to start fresh. So I carried the book around with me for a collection of weeks, moving it from bag to bag, and fully expected to need it at any given moment to capture an inspired word or a necessary prayer. While there have been plenty of times since then that I should have put pen to paper, the journal went unblemished. For far, far too long. I finally cracked it open today and inked it up for the first time.

A writer is hardly a writer if she doesn’t write.

I’ve been thinking about this very thing these days, and while I blog regularly now, there’s so much more that I don’t say–and that perhaps I should say, somewhere, before it gets lost in the abyss. When I finally started writing today, I felt a twinge of guilt and a little more, even, of disappointment. I know that there are sentiments I’d love to remember but will always forget because I didn’t write them down. I’d like to do a much better job of capturing life and emotion and memory than I’ve been doing, and I think that there’s value in it…so I’m going to try.

I don’t know what this will look like when the baby comes, or how I’ll stay motivated to write and blog daily when work and meetings and planning and exhaustion all stack themselves up together during the week, but I think it’s important. I’m telling you, because then I feel like there’s actually some accountability to the whole thing…a world of people out there who read once that I was going to write more. And somehow that matters to me.

I’ve been an irresponsible writer. I can do better. I want to do better. I love to write more than so many other things, and there’s nothing like a blank moleskine page to inspire. Pen and paper. I’m kind of old-fashioned like that.

between the lines,

mm