A Practice: My Hobonichi Techo

When I started learning how to ride my scooter, I quickly learned a valuable lesson. Look where you want to go. This sounds so obvious, but it’s not as easy as it sounds. If you saw me riding in those first few days, you’d know it didn’t come to me naturally. I wanted to turn into the right hand lane, but my eyes would lock onto the cars I was trying to avoid in the left lane and my scooter would head right towards them. Eek!

Life, it turns out, is a lot like my scooter lesson. If you focus on the negative, you’ll find the negative. The opposite is also true, look for the positive and you’ll find the positive.

I started using my first Hobonichi Techo at the end of December and bonded with it right away. But I wasn’t entirely sure how I wanted to use it. I knew I’d use it to keep track of appointments, but what would I do with the rest of the page- that gorgeous Tomoe River paper page?

I quickly decided to use the monthly index pages to jot down some notes about the day’s weather. My grandmother used to routinely record the weather on a calendar that hung by her back porch door, so maybe this urge is genetic.

I also decided to use the “knife and fork”prompt on each daily page to record what we ate for dinner. Yes, ham again!

But how was I going to use the rest of the daily pages?

Initially I started doing a kind of activity log- we went here, we did this- but I was only a few days in before I started boring myself. Do I really need a record of the errands I’ve run? My daily Field Notes to-do lists fill this niche pretty nicely, so rehashing the day-to-day stuff in my Hobonichi seemed redundant.

The answer to this datebook dilemma was handed to me by a friend. “Why don’t we,” she said, “record three good things for each day? Three things we’re grateful for.” We’d been talking about journaling and how we both suffer from “new journal paralysis” when this idea popped up. “Yes!” I said, and a new practice was born.

On some days, I may jot down a quote that hits home, or a verse or note from a sermon, but I always record my three things. In a world that’s gone haywire, with so much in our lives that’s hard, closing out the day by writing down those small special moments keeps my focus where it should be- on all that I’m grateful for, on the positive.

Keep your eyes focused on where you want to go and you’ll get there. It just takes a little daily practice.