Morning pages

The book Artist's Way describes an exercise called Morning Pages. This is an exercise that the author, Julia Cameron, challenges the reader to do every day for a minimum of twelve weeks. The exercise is to write by longhand, three pages of stream of consciousness thoughts.

Could I do this for twelve weeks? Every day?!? Well, only one way to find out. I pulled out a notebook I used to journal in longhand before I started journaling electronically on my PDA. I used that notebook for a couple of days and then bought myself a new journal specifically for this exercise. Cameron encouraged me to make a commitment for twelve weeks, and I was uncertain whether I'd be able to keep up the pace for that long, but I was willing to give it a go. This was in January, twelve weeks ago. I was not on a work assignment at the time, so it was easy to fit doing the pages into my daily schedule. At first.

On some days, doing three pages just flowed. On other days, it was a stretch. Some days it seemed like I was putting in a lot of filler just to reach my three page target.

The three page requirement stretched me; it caused me to push on even when I ran out of things to say, to really reach within and write some thoughts that I'd never dared to write before, not even in my journal.

I was quite pleased that I was able to maintain this daily ritual - for six consecutive weeks. After six weeks I started a new work assignment; my day was busy and my evening calendar has been quite full since then as well. For the last few weeks all I've managed to get in was about two days a week of doing the pages.