Hi Reader:
I have really enjoyed sharing my sketchbooks with you every month. Every time I take a rumpled sketchbook off the shelf, it’s like meeting up with an old friend. Once again, I have experienced how recording words and pictures in a sketchbook journal creates a time capsule that can take me back whenever I turn the page. The moment floods back to me—not just the images, but the sounds, smells, flavors, and feelings, too, still fresh and zesty.
I read recently that three weeks after we hear some information, we generally retain just 10% of it. But when that information is accompanied by an image, our retention rate soars to 65%.
Our extraordinary brains were designed to process and retain images. Words came much later.
As we get older and our neck-top computers are crammed with so many years of experiences, we worry that our precious memories are disappearing. But my sketchbook journals prove to me time and again that I can rewind time 20 years and relive every precious moment in full resolution, retaining names and places and times with extraordinary clarity.
My memory is most vivid when my experiences are lived to the fullest. when I’m distracted and inattentive, my brain just doesn’t retain information as completely when it is forced to multitask.
My journals take me to the past, but it doesn’t feel like nostalgia. It feels like experiencing that moment all over again. The past becomes present in the pages of my sketchbook.
The world these days is crammed with options.
We can travel across the globe in a day or two. We can turn on our televisions and watch every movie ever made whenever we want. We can slip a device out of our pockets and be dropped into a dozen simultaneous conversations. Every news item pings us to insistently relay its urgency. We find it’s impossible to ever be bored.
But it’s also much more challenging to be present, to simply sit and listen to a bird in a tree, or feel the wind on our face, or enjoy our food mouthful by mouthful, or focus undivided on the person we’re talking to.
But I find that when I draw, I am completely undistracted. In fact, if I am not 100% present, my drawing suffers and shows me that I’m not fully engaged.
The experience is profound and rich, like meditation, or prayer, or yoga. While it is something we can probably live without, we can’t live fully and richly unless we experience each day as it is handed to us.
The simple act of putting a pen on paper and devoting all of one’s brain power to this moment has been the most profound experience I’ve had. That’s why I’ve written books and essays and made courses and videos to reiterate time again: this is something we should all try.
It may not reward you fully right away; it’s a daily practice. But in time, the benefits will flow.
Sadly, too many people worry that their drawing skills and their struggles with writing preclude them from having this experience. But as my yoga teacher taught me long ago, while some people can effortlessly strike any yoga pose, and others feel lumbering and constricted, everybody has their own way of practicing dharma.
That is its power — that we all can follow our own path to enlightenment.
We can all fly to Paris but we each bring our own passport with its own number. We sit in our own seat. We experience every moment in our own way. We each end up with our own Paris.
The inner critic is not a good tour guide to bring along. He misses the point of experiencing every day, interrupting with warnings that we could be doing this or that more perfectly, that we shouldn’t be taking certain risks. He’s not a fan of adventure or discovery or accidents, happy or otherwise.
Ignore him if you can.
Life is full of things we could never have anticipated or planned. And it’s tempting to erase them from our memories, those things that took us by surprise or caused this pain or shook our sense of ourselves.
But my sketchbooks are witnesses to all these feelings and mishaps, and they are happy to hold onto them for me so I don’t feel compelled to drag those experiences around. But I also don’t have to worry that I’ve misplaced their lessons. They’re available when I need them.
I hope that by opening these private journals and sharing them with you, I have been able to give you a glimpse of the power of illustrated journaling. It’s not hard to start, and it’s not hard to continue.
But as you do, as your pages fill up, as your bookshelf fills up, your heart and soul will fill up, too. Fill up with the rich beauties of life on this wonderful planet.
I’m glad that we’ve been able to share them together.
Your pal,
Danny
Thank you for being a paid subscriber to my Studio Notebook! |