Morning Pages Check-In

I’ve been doing Morning Pages, more or less, consistently for about six years now. There was a period right after the pandemic began and the boys were born where I stopped the practice, for a couple of reason. Children occupy a large swath of your time, the world felt like it was ending and I was trying to be as present as possible, also children, also I wasn’t really going anywhere anymore and Morning Pages used to be the thing I would do at a coffee shop in-between tutoring clients. Doing it at home felt…I don’t know, off?

But after my grandmother passed, someone who encouraged me to keep writing even in these inert times, I picked up the habit again.

You can check out the origins of the practice here, at Julia Cameron’s site, but the way I like to look at it is: it’s guilt free writing. Three pages, maybe 400? 500? words of nonsense. You might find some gems buried in the trash, but these aren’t the kind of journal entries your descendants are going to look back on and think, “Wow, grandpa, you sure worried about the same thing, over and over and over again, and wrote about it, over and over and over again. Do we need to take you to a home?”

“Morning Pages are three pages of longhand, stream of consciousness writing, done first thing in the morning. There is no wrong way to do Morning Pages–they are not high art. They are not even “writing.” They are about anything and everything that crosses your mind– and they are for your eyes only. Morning Pages provoke, clarify, comfort, cajole, prioritize and synchronize the day at hand. Do not over-think Morning Pages: just put three pages of anything on the page…and then do three more pages tomorrow.”

It’s within that trash you find the gems, and that’s what makes the practice beautiful.

I finished up this one, a Spider-Man notebook I got from Disneyland last year. Took about six months.

Actually, properly counted up my journals and ones meant for Morning Pages. Got the accurate number.

Moving back into a traveler’s notebook, three smaller notebooks I’ll bind together with a clip after all three are filled, for the remainder of the year.