Committing to Noticing

Easing into the New Year by paying more attention.

December was sort of a blur, wasn’t it? For me, there was a lot of running around, battling colds, then the malaise of COVID. Entering January I feel like I’m coming out of a thick fog. It feels nice. I can visualize my thoughts again.

Last week I wrote about my word of the year: commit. And my first act of committing is to pay more attention — not just to my surroundings and the people around me — but also to myself.

To notice things, you have to slow down. You have to take a beat longer to observe and consider. I want to move away from the feeling of “getting through” each day and savor things — especially small ordinary things — food, interactions, and interesting things I see out in the world.

This art print is available for paid subscribers to download at the end of this post!

All this to say, I’ve decided to restart my visual journal. I filled up a sketchbook over the summer with a one-page-a-day approach to documenting things I ate, saw, and experienced. It started as an attempt to savor everything I consumed in a purposeful way and turned into much more. There’s something I really like about these raw, messy pages. It makes me feel like I’m writing the story of my life.

I take photos throughout the day to help me remember what I might want to capture on the page. Then I flip through my camera roll the next morning to jog my memory. I always start by drawing my first beverage of the day — usually coffee. I don’t sketch anything first or spend time planning. I prefer to focus on filling the page one line at a time. The purpose of these pages is not to create beautiful results. The purpose is to communicate — to capture a snapshot, however chaotic.

This is one of my favorite pages from last summer:

Thanks for reading

Thanks for being here! It truly means the world to me to connect with you every week. Paid subscribers, please keep scrolling for a printable version of the “Slow Down” illustration shown above.