Year in Review (Plus, An Abundance of Notebooks)

I’m going through an exercise from Rabbi Nivin’s Elul workshop that’s been interesting and helpful. It’s a year-in-review writing exercise that covers different areas of your life. Basically, you go through different topics and write about what worked and didn’t work this year. The idea is to scan backwards over the past year and just write whatever comes to mind, underlining anything that really stands out as important. The topics I am writing about are:

friendships

shidduchim

parents

siblings

work

emotional

physical

davening

emunah and bitachon

Shabbos

halacha

 

I am just surrounded by notebooks, especially in Elul. I have my regular journal, my Chovos HaLevavos notes, and my Rabbi Nivin notes (which occupy the second half of a notebook I started years ago when I did Inner Torah). I also have a number of older journals that I keep around for reference. (Not to mention my wedding notebook.)

 

Here are some tips for the notebook-hungry:

When you’re taking a teleconference course, write the phone number and PIN of the course inside the cover of your notebook for extra convenience.

Workshops and teleconferences tend to come with homework assignments that entail lots of writing. Take as much space to write as needed — notebooks are cheap, you can always spill over into a new one.

Write the dates of the first and last entry of your journal on the front cover. This will help you find specific entries more easily and keep your journals in chronological order. Also, write the dates of the beginning and end of any course or teleconference you do, including the year — it is so interesting to look back later on at what you learned and wrote at different times in your life.

And, this time of year is still good for stocking up on notebooks at Staples for half price or less.

 

Hatzlacha!