MargenWe all own beautiful notebooks with only five written pages. The diary that lasted one January. The notebook from that trip. The «good» notebook that felt too precious to start and then too precious to continue.
We tend to count them as small defeats, and perhaps it is the other way round: every begun notebook is proof that once again you believed a more attentive version of yourself was possible. Five pages of January are worth something no completed planner has: the pure enthusiasm of someone beginning.
Museums keep artists' unfinished notebooks with full honours, and nobody calls them failures: they call them process.
So don't throw yours away, and don't finish them out of duty. Let them be what they are: doors you opened. And when you buy the next one —because you will—, start it without ceremony, on page one, with today's date. Beginning is a literary genre too.