In the Margins…

Welcome to August Marginalia—a monthly newsletter where I share what I’ve been learning, reading, listening to, watching, and Commonplacing. This is the month I turned 40, the month I officially experienced my oldest child no longer living with me, which has left me holding a strange mix of paradoxical feelings that I haven’t yet sorted out. I’m relieved, sad, lost, grateful, scared—all at the same time. I think a good journaling session is in order, but even that feels like too much right now and the current of life keeps pushing me along as I raise my two other girls. Leaning in on the topic of joy has been a lovely companion amidst it all.

Allegedly, August is the first month people begin to wrap their mind around autumn, but I say we must wait for the Autumn equinox on September 22! I will not be entertaining thoughts of fall until then. I say this as a disgruntled Floridian who won't really experience fall weather until November. I sincerely hope you are experiencing lovelier weather in your corner of the world. I digress….

Let’s begin with five things I learned in (August)…

“August rain: the best of summer gone and the new fall not yet born.

The odd uneven time.” -Sylvia Plath

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We’ve had a lovely start to our commonplacing season focused on joy. I’ve learned a lot of valuable lessons so far, and have really benefited from you all sharing your spreads and research.

As I enter midlife, the concept of joy grows increasingly nebulous. Can anyone relate? When I try to recall what I find inherently joyful, I often think back to delightful moments from childhood. I struggle most when it comes to finding joy in adulthood, and that troubles me. It makes me wonder whether I’ve just slowly lost the capacity to notice delight in the everyday because I’ve somehow allowed the practice of “noticing” to atrophy with age.

Even still, I desperately want to believe that joy doesn’t depend on my remembering to look for it and that it persists whether or not I’m paying attention.

When I consider the great thinkers and texts of our time who thoughtfully grappled with these ideas, I find a similar understanding. Joy isn't the fleeting thing we may think of it as. Joy isn't tethered to the unpredictable weather of any given day but steady, and closer to a disposition than an event. Children are oriented toward whatever delight the day offers without trying, and adults seemingly spend a lifetime unlearning it if we aren’t careful.

I’ve only just started my research and I am comforted in knowing that I can orient my heart and mind to be sensitive to the smallest of delights around me if I set the intention.

How do we practice remembering, and what practices or disciplines could form our disposition into one that finds joy any and everywhere?

I wrote a list in my pocket journal with the suggestions you all had for the joyful practices you want to incorporate into your days:

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Your isolation is someone’s business model.

I say this to you with the utmost compassion after a research rabbit hole inspired by my recent reading of a novel that opened my eyes to the cost of female isolation and just how much money there is to be made from women who are lonely, and how long this has been true.

Before I continue, I will add that I am aware that isolation is a problem for both men and women, and eliminating the cause of living an isolated life is harder for some than others—sometimes seemingly impossible. This essay is not meant to be a reprimand, but more like a lamp to shine on an issue that I, like many, experience.

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The Wall by Marlen Haushofer is a masterfully executed tale about a woman who is vacationing in the Alps , when she suddenly awakens to discover that there is an invisible wall separating her from the rest of civilization. Throughout the rest of the book, we accompany her as she sheds her socially constructed identity, and makes sense of a new life in isolation, as the sole caretaker of the land she thereby inherited. There were so many beautiful reflections on her experience that landed so close to the very core of my experience as a woman, that I am a different person after reading that book than I was before.

This particular passage, which I commonplaced, talks about the reality of isolation while surrounded by people:

“I always kept quiet about this heavy load; a man wouldn't have understood, and the women felt exactly the same way as I did. And so we preferred to chat about clothes, friends and the theater and laugh, keeping our secret, consuming worry in our eyes. Each of us knew about it, and that's why we never discussed it. That was the price we paid for our ability to love.” Marlen Haushofer, The Wall

The narrator in this story isn’t describing physical isolation, but an isolation present in company when we are not honest with one another, despite the fact that we are carrying similar burdens. This is a reality for so many of us that makes us feel lonelier in company than without.

We talk quite a lot about overconsumption, but not enough about what’s underneath. I have come to believe that isolation is one of its most powerful engines, the reason we are so easily influenced, and why doomscrolling has become the most expensive hobby most of us have.

The deeply disturbing reality is that marketing strategies are built to target our isolation and it’s putting millions of dollars into the pockets of major corporations. Some examples that come to mind are the successful recruitment of women by other women into multilevel marketing, the momfluencer economy, skincare advertising, soap operas, and the list goes on. What is being sold to us in all of these examples is a product masking itself as a relationship.

When we have honest human connection, we turn less readily toward finding our identity in shopping, and we are far less fooled by the idea that we can become who we've wanted to be by buying our way there.

Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, describes a few forms of friendship, one of them being a friendship of utility. This is where two people are friends because they are useful to each other, but when that the usefulness dissolves, so does the friendship. Think of the acquaintance you haven't heard from since high school who reaches out to talk about products she is selling (this has happened to me too many times to name), or the brand that works overtime to interact with you the way a friend would. I am not saying this is inherently wicked, but we cannot mistake it for real connection.

“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.” C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

There are some things we experience as women that are hardly survivable alone: grieving, chronic illness, a relationship in a hard season, a move to a new city, menopause, to name a few. We need the intimacy that starts with honesty about where we are because we simply were not created to carry these burdens alone, which is why we shouldn’t think of this as merely a self-discipline problem.

We are not weak-willed because we sometimes reach for counterfeit forms of connection like our phones, or “retail therapy.” We are reaching for what we perceive to be the nearest available substitute that’s intentionally engineered to entice us into thinking it will offer momentary camaraderie.

If you have ever worried that you are too easily influenced, or noticed that you own things you cannot quite remember choosing for yourself, or found that the labels you wear were selected for you by an impulsive feeling rather than a reflection of your taste, I would ask you to consider looking beyond the lie that it’s a problem of self-control, and become curious about how content you are with the relationships you currently have. I wonder if the real question to ask ourselves, then, when we reach for one of these counterfeit forms of connection is “what am I really hungry for?”

We are not lacking self control so much as we are underfed, and there is a great deal of money in keeping things that way. A woman who knows what she is truly hungry for is much harder to sell to.

What does it mean that the answer to a woman's loneliness is being outsourced to a company rather than the companionship of another woman?

Beyond the wall, for paid subscribers: a list for further reading…

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As I write this, it is day 3 of art camp for my daughters and I took one of the last opportunities I’ll have this summer to work at my local book store. While writing another essay, I thought about how I want to be painfully, even humiliatingly honest in my journals knowing that one day my children could very well read them. The thought of purposely keeping a separate journal specifically for the eyes of others is moving in the opposite direction of what I hope to accomplish with my journaling practice. So, what do I actually want them to find instead?

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Anytime I go on an extended stay I make sure to bring my journals, some good books, handicrafts, and some essays for fodder to satiate my curiosity. I love to share with you where my curiosity leads me, and I’m so grateful many of you love to learn alongside me and share your own learnings as well.

As of late, I've been commonplacing about leisure, something I've been particularly curious about since University. A little digging led me to the ancient Roman concept of Otium. Otium has a variety of meanings, but the one I’ll be referencing is this:

Otium is a Latin term that refers to a state of leisure, peace, or freedom from duties, often used to describe a condition of productive rest or intellectual contemplation.

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The concept of Otium was widely discussed amongst roman philosophers and poets as a state that offered philosophical growth, a call to use leisurely time wisely for self cultivation and actualization, or a usage of time that involves appreciating nature and beauty. Though each philosopher had a slightly different take on how one should spend their leisurely hours, the commonality shared amongst all definitions was that our free time should be spent doing things that edify our minds with beautiful ideas, make us more knowledgeable, and inspire in us better character by way of art, literature, philosophy, etc. Most importantly, it is done with the goal of responsible citizenship in mind.

I love learning because I have a curious mind, so the act of studying and falling down curiosity rabbit holes, and keeping a commonplace book is pleasurable and entertaining. If left to my own devices, without an aim these can easily become a hobby I pursue that benefits no one but myself. (To be clear, this is ok too, but it’s about balance!)

It’s helpful to come back to the ancient Romans’ understanding. The goal is not to fill ourselves up with knowledge, but to engage in Otium, in the hopes that we can contribute to society in a meaningful way. One that values truth, virtue, goodwill towards others, and honor. I love that this inherently acknowledges beauty and knowledge as transformative.

If our leisurely time is spent nourishing our minds, bodies, and souls, a byproduct of that is better citizenship. We are better equipped to love those around us, and live our lives with others in mind because our actions whether there are witnesses or not, and who we are becoming is not in a vacuum. Most if not all of what we do with our time impacts others, and I don’t mean that to overwhelm us with the pressure of perfection, but to communicate the weight of what we choose to do with our time.

Please don’t misunderstand what I’m saying— I do not mean that every moment we spend in leisure has to directly benefit others, I am only speaking to the specific concept of Otium. If you want to drink a cold beer and read a book, by all means do it! I’ll be writing soon about cultivating joy and delight for such activities.

If you are curious about how to cultivate Otium in your life, I’d love to share some ideas that I’ve come up with.

A few ways to cultivate Otium

For the mind

• Keep a commonplace book-copy passages and ideas from books or media that left an impression on you.

• Read old texts- Stoics, philosophers, poets, classics, etc.

• When a curiosity rabbit hole grabs you, keep a running research journal for it

• Carry a pocket journal for your own thoughts

For the hands

• Take up a handicraft- embroidery, woodworking, pottery, needle felting, knitting, needlepoint, leather work, spinning wool

• Churn your own butter- this might seem random, but I think slow tasks like this really contribute to a sense of accomplishment.

• Bind a small book by hand (I adore this book for teaching how to do this!)

• Learn a new skill

• Mend something instead of replacing it

For the body, outdoors

• Take strolls outside like great thinkers have done for centuries

• Sit on your porch or yard and just observe the things around you in silence

• Tend something that grows like a garden, a windowsill herb, or a potted plant

• Become familiar with the birds that visit your property and learn a few birdsongs to identify

For the people around you

• Host a dinner with courses for a few people

• Read something aloud to someone like a poem, a novel, an essay, etc.

• Talk about what you’re learning with someone who’d enjoy hearing it. I love this for assimilating the things I’ve learned and engaging in good intellectual exchanges. (It does not have to be strictly about classics or stiff books)

• Ask yourself periodically: is the leisure I’m practicing making me more useful to the people in my life, or just more entertained?

I hope this gives you some inspiring ideas for how to find joy in self study, and cultivation that excite you! Please leave some ideas you have in the comments!

Warmly,

Lilly

There’s a lie buried in most advice about journaling that if you sit down and write you should find clarity, or healing, so we open our journals with pen in hand, already burdened and pressured before we’ve started.

This is a paralysis I have become intimately familiar with. Some days I don’t know what to say and other days there’s too much to say, and both are tainted by the same underlying idea that naming what I actually feel in all its ugliness, and an expectation that I will somehow write it all down and gain clarity. I might reach for a profound journal prompt to help me along.

A few weeks ago I shared a page from my commonplace book about Murakami’s method for writing, and I found so many of you like me were similarly pulled to the wisdom he shared. The creative life is something I’ve been diligently exploring this past year with this aim, trying to get closer to the source of my own creativity, guarding my attention so I can actually notice things, and admiring other creators who seem noticeably attuned to their own.

Murakami’s philosophies on writing offered a simple, unassuming answer that lifted the burden of expectation I didn’t realize I carried about the writing life. The framework is that a simple sensory prompt eases a person into honest writing while sometimes a more direct, reflective one tends to produce paralysis.

We write what we notice first, and we let the reflection come after.

In his novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle he says “What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world.” He was writing about how little of reality we actually register, but the same idea works as a method for journaling. We aren’t meant to account for the whole of our interior life every time we sit to write in our journals. Ordering your whole life around presence, the way Murakami does, isn't something most of us can do overnight, but a sensory prompt is a miniature version of the same discipline.

This reminded me of a favorite passage from Parker Palmer’s book Hidden Wholeness.

“The soul is like a wild animal—tough, resilient, savvy, self-sufficient and yet exceedingly shy. If we want to see a wild animal, the last thing we should do is to go crashing through the woods, shouting for the creature to come out. But if we are willing to walk quietly into the woods and sit silently for an hour or two at the base of a tree, the creature we are waiting for may well emerge, and out of the corner of an eye we will catch a glimpse of the precious wildness we seek.”

Isn’t that a lovely way to think of our journaling practice? I liken the concept of “crashing through the woods” to our burdensome expectation to gain clarity in our writing by reaching for some nebulous goal of profundity.

Your journal should be a safe space, free from the pressure of how you'll sound or how you'll be perceived. Let it be a way of processing what's around you through the lens only you hold, and let that be enough. A successful entry is one where you've explored a single thing that's true and real. On its face, that may sound insignificant, but when I use this as a creative exercise, to write more concisely and descriptively, I often find myself reflecting on something else entirely.

What you resolve to do when you sit down to journal carries a lot of weight in determining what you end up with.

If you want to give it a try with me, start by describing a sensory detail from the last hour of your day and see where you end up.

If you’re curious to explore this further, try these journal prompts and see how you feel:

-What does silence sound like where you are? Is there ever true silence, or is it full of small noise?

-Describe a piece of clothing you put on this week

-Write about the last time you cooked a meal, and what that experience was like.

I hope you’re inspired to take the pressure off of your journaling practice, and write a little more each day.

Warmly,

Lilly

Hello, friend.

The time has come for us to begin our shared commonplace practice together! This has been a thought in my head and desire in my heart for a few months now, and as I become more comfortable on this platform, I only grow more excited to connect with all of you with similar values to do something as radical as creating space for our intellectual and creative lives in community and resisting distraction.

Before I get into the practicalities, I want to share my “why” so that you can perhaps think on yours or be inspired to reflect on why you are joining this community, and why you want to take seriously the practice of keeping a commonplace book. I try to get my why straight before I commit to anything because without it, there’s little hope for consistency.

If you are completely new to commonplacing, make sure to first check out my post below for basic information:

Why commonplace?

As I age, I become increasingly aware of how important what I do with my time is. Cultivating curiosity, wonder, and the habits of the woman I want to become won't happen if I stay on the conveyor belt of productivity culture — doomscrolling, rushing, living on autopilot without an intentional practice of presence at all.

Distraction is the great enemy of a life hungrily pursuing knowledge, beauty, and truth — the cornerstones of what philosophers have long called the good life. Leisure is becoming harder to make time for, yet leisure is where we learn to notice and be moved by beauty. If we keep drifting on autopilot, we’ll look back one day and realize we never did what we always meant to.

Slowing down to create and notice is simply a beautiful way to live. Commonplacing is a fun, structured way to do that by filling our minds with beautiful ideas that inspire us, while feeding both our desire to make beautiful things and our desire to stay intellectually engaged. A creative life is easier to sustain with accountability and friendship around it, so why not do it together? (See: C.S. Lewis and the Inklings.)

Now that I’ve shared the “why” of it all, let’s look at how this season’s practice together will look like, and I’ll share some suggestions for supplies, and other practicalities.

Season One’s Theme : Joy (its history, habits, and color)

About half of you voted on our first theme, and as a result we will be focusing on the theme of Joy: its history, habits, and color. Our first season will run for roughly eight weeks. That will give us time to savor our ideas before moving on to the next, but not so much time that we lose our momentum in a lull. Each week I’ll drop a new prompt here to guide our research and give our commonplacing a little direction. My hope is that through our shared discussion in the chat, you will be encouraged to show up in your commonplace book consistently, no matter what that looks like for you.

Our weekly rhythm

Throughout the week we will be gathering in the chat (located within the substack platform), where you can expect the following:

1. The week’s prompt: a direction for our research and entries.

2. A little something to spark curiosity: a question to discuss, a film to watch, a poem, or a rabbit hole.

Sharing is completely optional. If you’re inspired to post a photo of your spread in the chat, I would be delighted to see it, but if you prefer to keep your entries private, I understand! There’s no pressure here!

Week 1: What does joy mean to you?

Before we research anyone else’s ideas of joy, we will start with assessing our own. In week 1 we will start by pulling three or four images that feel most like joy to you (I shared some of my own above, and they might overlap with yours so feel free to share them again. You can pull them from Pinterest, Google, old magazines and print and paste them onto your first spread. For the writing portion, share what you came up with and don’t overthink it!

For the chat: Introduce yourself and share what you came up with when thinking on your own ideas of joy, and what images you found! This is where we can find a treasure trove of images to print for inspiration in our own entries so share away!

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An Important Note..

Marginalia goes out to paid members every month, but I'm opening July’s issue to everyone, because next week the Commonplace Circle opens and I wanted to offer a peek into one of the more casual aspects of this publication. For the month of July, members get to join for $6. Learn more about it here!

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In the Margins…

Welcome to July Marg…

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Earlier this year I resolved to make better use of my pocket journal and in so doing, I spent some time crawling the internet for ideas. Since I’ve been so delighted by all the content my fellow journal enthusiasts have come up with, I wanted to throw (or rather, gently place) my fountain pen into the ring and add some of my own suggestions.

I’m so proud of my pocket journals. They feel so chic to have as an everyday carry, but more importantly, keeping them has been a deliberate discipline for training my attention to notice and delight in beauty. Who doesn’t need more of that, honestly?

As someone who’s been journaling since childhood, I have carried around journals of all types and sizes. My childhood was quite lonely, so it was a beautiful way of passing the time with a familiar companion. At the time, I would write down ideas for commercials, sketch fictional characters, design ball gowns, and jot down jokes of the knock-knock variety. Keeping a pocket journal as an adult feels like a nod to that little girl who just wanted room to leave her creative mark.

I have also found them to be a really effective way to replace uses for my phone, so I want to share some of the ideas I have come up with for how you can use one that I think are easy and enjoyable:

1. A Poetry or Sonnet Notebook

This idea was inspired by The Living Page by Laurie Bestvater. I started this practice with my children in our commonplace books years ago, but I only recently realized it would be a great use for a pocket journal. It is as simple as it sounds—copy poems by hand that you enjoyed, read, loved, or want to study or memorize. After starting the challenge by to read a Shakespeare sonnet a day recently, I’ve decided copying sonnets would also be a lovely use for my pocket journal.

2. Word study

Some of you might know that I spent a few years teaching Spanish, and as part of the philosophy of language learning that I taught, my students were encouraged to keep a word journal because this was a crucial way to pick up a new language. One day I had the realization that there’s nothing stopping me from creating a word journal in languages I’m fluent in. Think of it as a personal dictionary where you can collect words you find to be beautiful, unknown, strange, offensive, interesting along with their meanings—you get to decide.

3. Vision Scripting

Vision scripting is my take on a manifesting notebook—similar in spirit but different in aim. I use vision scripting to picture success in situations that are hard for me to navigate, mostly relational ones, where I lack confidence because I either wasn’t shown what success looks like or haven’t had the experience yet to know. Playing the scene forward, imagining a confident, well handled version, and writing it down in narrative form in present tense gives me the courage to act as I mean to.

I’ve scripted hard conversations with my husband, conversations with friends where I hold a boundary clearly and kindly, or unfamiliar leadership situations I didn’t feel fully ready to take on. Instead of walking in nervous and unprepared, I walk in already believing it will go well, and trusting that everyone involved means well, too.

4. An album of pressed flowers

My family and I go tent camping a couple of times each year, and occasionally I have the fortune of traveling outside of the state. Every so often I pick wildflowers when I’m visiting a new destination and press them (the express route in the microwave), using glue tape to stick them to the page. I identify them and include a little memory or blurb about where I found them or what I discovered about them. Much like a nature journal, these are scientific records, so as much detail as I can add to them makes for delightful data points to return to throughout the years.

5. Personalized Color Swatches

Through my practice of self-studying art, I’ve come to have a new relationship with color, and a better eye for noticing repetition in palettes used by my favorite artists (Mary Cassatt being one of them). I thought it would be fun to create some pages with beautiful combinations of colors, and naming them whatever I wanted to! It feels like an enchanting dose of whimsy, and easy enough to do when I’m feeling overstimulated. I used acrylic paint markers for the pages pictured below, but oil pastels, markers, and really any medium that can capture the color you’re going for work.

6. Penmanship or Calligraphy Practice

Sometimes when people share ideas for journal spreads, they are often accompanied by pictures of nearly perfect pages, so here’s my way of dispelling any ideas of superiority you may have about me and showing you just what a novice I am with a calligraphy marker.

This was my first page of handwriting practice, and while I did get better, I have not been consistent, so my progress is to be determined. Either way, I love to have pages dedicated to handwriting practice for when I want something to focus on that is soothing and easy enough to begin on the go. Sometimes I use it to practice calligraphy, other times to work on my penmanship.

7. Nature Journaling

Before I moved to a travel journaling system, I always kept a separate nature journal, and I find that keeping a pocket sized notebook is less intimidating and more encouraging of a consistent practice of recording beautiful species of plants or animals I encounter in nature. My absolute favorite guide for learning how to keep a nature journal is The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling. I use it to learn and teach my own children how to keep nature journals.

I hope you’ve found some ideas here that inspire you to fill your own pocket journal pages with things that bring you joy and delight in everyday life. Feel free to share some of your own ideas below!

Warmly,

Lilly

I recently made a commonplace entry about Aristotle's belief that our actions shape us more than any amount of self understanding could, and found myself intrigued enough to keep pulling on the thread and letting it teach me about the places in my own life where I fail to follow through on the promises I’ve made to myself.

I find that the ideas raised by great thinkers on this offer real encouragement for the goals we've given up on. The same goals we've written off because we've decided we're not 'that person.'

Following through is a multi dimensional process that requires us to get straight our ideas, our expectations, and the comforts we hold dearly and since our ideas shape our actions-let’s explore a new idea about the gap between resolving and doing.

I’ve collected the sources at the end, in case you want to commonplace them yourself.

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Hello, friend.

I’ve had dozens of you ask me how to start a commonplace book, and today I’d like to invite you into a community that I’ve always wanted but didn’t know how to create space for, until I found Substack.

As I prepare to turn 40 and my children become more independent, I’ve faced a reckoning of sorts and I’m still in the midst of lots of existential questions about what it means to live a good life, be a woman, to love the people in and out of my own home well, while exploring parts of me I was always afraid had to take a backseat to being a mother-figure or big sister to everyone around me.

Through this community I’ve discovered so many women have the same craving as I do for indulging in learning and the education they’ve always wanted, and an even greater craving for carving space for themselves to learn, create, and build deeply intimate friendships around their wildest dreams.

What is a commonplace book?

A commonplace book is a personal collection of quotes, passages, observations, recipes, sketches, ideas that are copied out by hand and organized however makes sense to you. Think of it as part scrapbook, part journal, part personal encyclopedia.

It’s much simpler than it may have been presented to you, but also has room for creative variation. The practice of keeping a commonplace book has been one of the most meaningful evidences of my decision to guard my attention and foster a deeper intellectual life, and when I look back on years of quotes I’ve collected, I am overcome with a weighty sense that my choice to spend time this way will not only impact me for the better, but will create ripples of permission for other women for generations to come. (Is that too dramatic? Good.)

I write about the basics of commonplace book keeping here:

The Structure

Each season, the Circle votes on a theme with some leaning on classic liberal arts, and other seasons themed toward lived experience and the questions that come up in ordinary living, from joy and color to solitude and connection.

Some example themes will be:

When the theme drops, we will take it wherever our own curiosity leads us. There will be a casual path for those who want to explore freely and share what they find in our private member chat, and a deeper path for those who want more structure: a spread guide with suggested entry types and a curated reading and watching list for going further in. You can choose how involved you get, and we can share our sources, spreads, and research in the chat for inspiration!

Periodically, we will gather together on an optional video call to create together and work on our commonplace books, sharing the research we’ve found with each other. As an introvert, I love gathering with people, while having something to do with my hands. It’s the BEST.

I am also sincerely encouraging members to organize their own gatherings with each other whenever the mood strikes, because I would love nothing more than this community taking on a life outside of this platform.

What you get when you join

• On August 1st you will receive the starter guide on our first season’s theme we voted on and some inspiration around how we will be commonplacing and the ideas

• A printable ephemera sheet to get you started right away

• Seasonal themed prompts, spread guides, and optional reading, listening, viewing suggestions

• A private member chat for sharing sources, spreads, and inspiration

• Periodic live video sessions and community meetups

If you’re already a paid member of The Grand Tour, this is included and no action needed.

Joining and pricing

The Commonplace Book Circle opens August 1st at $8/month. Members who join before then will keep a rate of $6/month for as long as you’re a member as a way of saying thank you to the people who will help shape this. As a founding member, including everyone already part of the Grand Tour, you’ll help vote on our very first season’s theme.

I hope to see you there, friends.

Warmly,

Lilly

As I turn 40, I find myself on the other side of a life that naively fell for the messaging that I was just a few well-planned systems away from living the life I always wanted and it's taught me there are things we should not optimize. Truthfully, I often have to protect myself from this line of thinking — my Type B with a side of Type A personality eats it up. But the aftermath of years striving for better systems has left me with sleep deprivation, a damaged metabolism, endless life admin and household chores I still don't desire to stay on top of, and crippling shame.

Don’t get me wrong—I appreciate structure, I love lists, I work well when I have solid expectations and there were certainly benefits to all of the advice that I accepted about how to optimize the aspects of my life that didn’t quite feel like they were up to “standard".”

What I didn't realize at the time was that these areas in my life needed more wisdom, and that no amount of optimization advice would make me the type of person who would implement it. Turning my life into an optimized machine was a sure way for me to miss that these routines are meant to spark gratitude and delight and make me better able to connect and love those around me. They are things I get to do with my “one wild and precious life” (Mary Oliver).

I much prefer romanticizing my routines over optimizing them, because that suggests that we are fighting for noticing the beauty they can open our lives up to. As I was journaling about this recently, figuring out how to create balance between a structure I can thrive with, and the freedom to notice joy and delight, I realized that there are things we should simply not optimize, but before I list them, let’s define optimization:

These are some of the routines I believe we should not optimize:

Sleep

With so much fighting for our attention, we are having a harder time than ever protecting the natural rhythms that allow our body time to heal and grow. We should absolutely guard and protect the habits that help us to get a good night’s rest, but optimization suggests things like “biohacking” sleep via sleep scores which is another performance metric that causes more anxiety and even worse sleep. Create a lovely evening routine instead:

-Take a hot shower

-Pair a scented candle with your night time routine

-Read a light book

-Journal

-Get in your most comfortable pajamas

-Work on a crossword puzzle by yourself or with a loved one

The creative life

Optimizing for output or virality kills the wandering, wasteful process that makes original work possible. Leave room for wonder, and “white space” and you’ll discover what makes you unique, what moves you, what you were meant to create. You’ll notice things no-one else but you can notice, because no one else on this earth is exactly like you. The world needs more of what you notice.

-Go on a nature hike

-Schedule time for thinking (doing something with your hands can help if you aren’t used to it like a puzzle with no headphones on, or a hand sewing project).

-Browse your local library for their hobby books and find something you’d like to try (collage books, hand sewing, embroidery, etc.)

Vacations/ Trips

Over planning a trip for maximum efficiency eliminates the chance encounters that can surprise us in the loveliest of ways. Leave room for serendipity.

-Try blocking a full day on a trip for unplanned adventures that you decide as you go

-Let your senses decide your plans (if you smell good food, or hear live music nearby…explore)

-Talk to some locals in the area and ask them what they enjoy doing and recommend you try

Food & eating

Optimizing meals purely for nutrition or macros can strip away pleasure, culture, and social bonding around food. This month, reading Taiwan Travelogue has really reminded me how much food and culture are inextricably linked. Though we absolutely need to nourish our bodies with healthy, nutritious food, we were never meant to treat food and eating as another metric to obsess over. Some ideas for unoptimized eating are:

-Foraging or Seasonal Eating (Eating what's actually available in a place and time instead of a curated, always available meal plan)

-Create a meal plan with a gathering in mind for friends and family as a way to enjoy a feast alongside connection.

-Let a meal run long (Stay put after the last bite instead of clearing plates the moment you're done.)

-Cook with someone (invite a friend or loved one into the kitchen even though it's slower and messier than doing it alone)

Grief, Transitions, or Emotional Processing

Grief has been treated as a productivity problem, or something with defined stages (Kubler-Ross's five stages, though she never intended them as a checklist). Once something has stages and a timeline, it tends to become optimized: skip ahead, do it faster, do it "right." People misuse the five stages as a literal sequence rather than what Kubler-Ross described as a loose, non-linear set of experiences that don't happen in order or on schedule.

Grief or emotional processing, when rushed through or suppressed doesn’t disappear. It tends to resurface later as anxiety, or physical symptoms, sometimes years after.

Here are some ways to let these seasons remain unoptimized:

-Journal without a prompt or goal

-Create transition rituals (a deliberate "first day" or “last day” ritual.) Transitions are especially memorable and transformative when we make the effort to mark them

-Allow for a waiting period before big decisions (after a transition, give yourself a deliberate stretch of time before optimizing the next step)

I’m not arguing against effort, or against wanting things to go well, but against the mindset of optimization colonizing every part of our lives. The invitation isn't to abandon planning or care, it’s to develop an eye for noticing the moments that are not meant to be managed, but delighted in.

Where are you sensing the nudge to delight or honor natural rhythms rather than optimizing and managing?

Happy delighting :)

Warmly,

Lilly

Before we begin

We are in final stretch of our reading, friends!! I mentioned this in the chat already, but I want to repeat it so that everyone can relieve themselves of any pressure to read faster than feels comfortable:

If you are not on pace to finish this book by the end of July, there is no rule that says you have to be or that we have to stop talk…

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In the Margins…

Welcome to June Marginalia—a newsletter where I share what I’ve been learning, reading, listening to, watching, and commonplacing.

As always, I have included a free printable card for you to carry in your journal in hopes that it’ll be a reminder and encouragement to you that beauty is worth making time for. If you print it, make sure to send a picture! I love to see how you all are using it.

The first official month of summer has come to a close, and I have finally gotten over the fact that it’s not winter and that I will have to embrace insufferable weather for about 4 more months (Florida…nuff said). I’ll be swimming, eating ice cream, forcing myself to take morning walks, and carrying around a personal fan to make the most of it. July, after all, does mean a reprieve from busy school schedules and more idling, so it’s not a bad tradeoff.

Let’s start with some lessons I’m learning this month:

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Most of our lives are made up of ordinary, seemingly mundane moments, and the way we transform them isn’t just by making them more aesthetically pleasing, but by changing how we think about them.

We’ve been calling it romanticizing, but I wonder if a truer word for it is sanctifying: setting it apart as sacred and treating it as worthy of our full, deliberate attention. What if we started sanctifying the pursuit of a richer intellectual and interior lives? These things inherently bring beauty.

Sometimes I worry that I am not strong enough to resist the attention economy on my own and that the pull of it is simply too well engineered for willpower alone. I try to ask myself another question when I experience this. What would I choose if I were already the woman I’m trying to become?

These are some of the habits I imagine she’d practice with consistency to guard her intellectual life:

1. She protects her capacity for boredom

We think of boredom as a problem to solve, and solve it instantly. I’d argue that boredom is required for deepening your capacity to think and where we can see our deeper mind emerge. The woman I’m trying to become knows it costs too much to fill boredom with overconsumption because she knows that the woman who never allows herself to be bored is one who has unknowingly handed over one of the most important capacities she has, so she fiercely guards hers.

Here are some practical ways we can do that:

-Let transitional moments stay unfilled (an elevator ride, a grocery store line, red lights, waiting at the doctor’s office)

-Keep one house chore silent (folding laundry, washing dishes, weeding in the garden)

-Let your walks or commutes be “unproductive”

-Practice 15 minutes pauses. When you feel restless and tempted toward reaching for your phone, wait fifteen minutes before giving in. This will give you time to discover what’s underneath that restlessness and urge.

-Keep one room in the house completely device free

-Choose the slower option on purpose (the longer commute, the longer line, the furthest parking spot, etc.)

2. She keeps a commonplace book

This is the difference between someone who consumes information and digests information. Our mind and capacity for intellect deeply hinge on the practices that we engage, and neuroscience alone will tell you that the act of writing things down is a powerful way of assimilating information. Recording what you’ve read and learned in a commonplace book helps us to keep the information we consume, both physically and mentally. I created a guide for beginners here.

Even lovelier is that it’s a record of her intellectual pursuits, curiosities, interests, and can be a delightful time capsule of sorts. I love to look back at my commonplace book and see what I chose to record. Most of the time it has a lot to do with what season I was in or it reminds me of rabbit holes my curiosity led me down.

3. She trains her attention

When she’s listening to a musical piece, or viewing a piece of art, she pays attention to what captivates her, and recognizes it as meaningful and formational.

This is what allows her to contribute to the discussion with purpose and a grounded sense of her own taste. She can name her favorite artist, or artistic style, her favorite composer, or era of music, etc. She is not moved as much by what she is told to like, but she exposes herself to a wide feast of beauty, and learns about what she brings to that conversation by what she is repeatedly captivated by. She has learned that her own responses are useful data and her taste is not borrowed.

Some practical ways we can implement this are:

-Resist multi-tasking and single-task instead as a resistance against the urge to become hyper efficient

-Protect the first hour of your morning from any input

-Start a practice of seasonably purging social media accounts or inputs that no longer serve you and your desire to value your attention and time

-Go “dark” for an entire day from all feeds

-Practice reading for long stretches of time, increasing bit by bit each day

4. She studies deeply not broadly

She resists the pressure to cover ground. While everything around her encourages consumption she has decided that depth is worth more to her than breadth. She chooses one thing and studies it with intention.

Examples of how to do this would be:

-Read one author for a season and study their body work, taking notes and ruminating on their ideas as you go

-Study in concentric circles. When studying a certain author or artist, study the time period, its history, the author’s contemporaries, etc. This will give you a full contextualized picture of what inspired the ideas you’re studying

-Keep a notebook for one topic you are curious about. I like to keep notebooks for different topics as a way to devote time and attention to a singular subject and learn all my curiosity desires on it

This list could be longer, but these are foundational and will take quite a bit of sacrifice considering there are economies flourishing from our inability to stay focused and attentive.

Personally, I struggle the most with number 4. I become excited about everything that I want to know and learn, and I end up knowing little about much and unable to concisely discuss any singular topic. I know this is because I have consumed too much information instead rather than truly engaging with the ideas and letting them change me.

I’m comforted that there are so many of you that want to be more disciplined about doing this, and want to do it with me in community. Thank you.

What sorts of habits would you add to this list?

Warmly,

Lilly

Many of you know that I built this community to encourage myself and others to make time for our interior lives by studying art, music, literature and more, because I believe it to be the most important thing we could do with our time and I believe the arts to be formative. I only really begun to understand how intellectually hungry and curious I am in …

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I had so many plans last week. Thursday was going to be the day I got all my filming done for my YouTube hard launch, went on a nature walk, took my new Paper Republic journal everywhere and let myself wander, finally folded the mountains of laundry that await me every single week (this one was a stretch), and cracked down on time-blocking. As soon as I…

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One thing about me, is that I’m always going to find a way to put a good journal to use. Journaling, since childhood, has been a companion and friend in times of grief, loneliness, joy, and celebration. I love that the act of journaling is both a resistance against the war on our attention, and a space I don’t have to pretend or guard myself.

In large part, most of my journals have functioned as command centers, places to reflect and ponder, quote and list keepers, and accounts of the life I have been living.

Recently, I added an A4 sized journal to my collection, and the size alone prompted me to think outside of the box. How in the world will I put all this precious surface area to use? What is the thing I want to be disciplined about making time for? Whatever that is, I decided, that’s what I’d use it for!

In working the problem backward, I remembered how much I’ve been longing to make time for playing, dreaming, and wondering. These are all things I scarcely make time for which changes nothing about the reality that I am dependent on leisure to live a full life and I desperately need to make more time to play, and rest, and create. (I write more about this here.)

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What a dreamer journal is

The way I see it is that planning is more about what you are going to do, and dreaming is about who we desire to become. When we dream, we engage in a form of play around imagining who we want to become, and then orient our plans to make it so. What I have found, after keeping this journal for a few months now, is that the dreaming practice actually makes the planning better, because you stop making plans without intention and you start to fathom that you can make plans to live the life you’ve desired to.

the journal for the job

Most of my working notebooks are A5 or smaller, which is perfect for writing and carrying around, but a dream journal needs room. A full A4 spread can hold a real collage, a proper sketch, a page of images arranged the way I want them without everything feeling cramped. If you are going to dedicate a journal to dreaming, I would genuinely encourage you to go larger than feels practical.

I chose Paper Republic because I adore their travel journals, but you are certainly allowed to use whatever you think will work for you. Whatever you choose, I encourage you to select something that will feel precious to you.

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The sketch insert

The first insert in my dreamer journal is a simple notebook I set aside for sketching. I’ve been trying to make more time for this as a beginner, which is why it fits well in my dreamer journal, because it’s where I get to dream, begin, and keep showing up and trying. Sometimes the easiest way this happens for me is by browsing on Pinterest, printing out an image I love and sketching it as best I can.

Beginner sketching as a journaling practice is one of the most purely enjoyable things I have added to my creative life. I am not trying to produce anything, but instead making time for something I’ve dreamed of getting better at which turns out to be good for me in ways that go well beyond my journaling.

If you want to start, the only real instruction I would give you is this: pick something you want to draw and draw it as badly as you need to.

Where most of my dreaming happens: My collage notebooks

The second insert is a notebook I dedicated entirely to collages where I do most of my dreaming. I source images from magazines, or Pinterest and the act of cutting and arranging and deciding what will make it on the card always feels like I’m at a slumber party with myself. It’s so fun and playful and oddly meditative. If you are someone who has ever felt overstimulated by Pinterest but still love the visual aspect of it, collaging in a notebook was the original Pinterest. Let’s bring it back!

Here is how my collage notebook is organized. These are my categories if you want some inspiration:

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A collage for my dream morning routine

This is probably my favorite of them all, because every time I open to it, I’m inspired to do the things I intend to in the morning. I filled it with images that describe the morning routine of the woman I want to become. I am very visual, so creating a morning routine collage is more useful than any written list I have ever made. If you are building this one, I would suggest working backward and asking yourself what you want you mornings to feel like, and then finding pictures that answer that question.

My signature style

I have spent most of my life in whatever was affordable and available, and the honest result of that is that I never really understood what my own style was nor did I feel comfortable in my own skin. What I did not anticipate was that it would become increasingly harder as I aged to know how to dress and where to shop. This collage is my attempt to visually figure it out by collecting images of silhouettes and colors combinations, and scents I love.If you are a woman who has felt puzzled trying to figure out your personal style for whatever reason— a style collage is a lovely way to flesh that out.

A collage for art and artists I love

I have been teaching myself to look at art for the past few years as part of my resolve to educate myself in beauty and I was excited to make room for a collage to play around with and display some of the art I’ve come to love. I chose artists that have become favorites, what styles I am drawn to, images from museum exhibitions I have attended or hope to.

A collage for the places I want to travel

This section is my most indulgent, but I’m not mad about it. I included pictures of all the countries I want to visit or revisit. I also pictures of what I imagine myself to be doing in those countries like the one depicting my husband and I in our old age walking alongside the Mediterranean just being elderly, and delightfully present.

A collage for books I want to read

Or rather, the books I want to make time to read. Looking at it makes me giddy to read all of these books and live in delusion that I can read every single book I’ve ever wanted to in one lifetime. I’d love your book recs, because I know there will me pages and pages added to this particular spread.

The monthly collage: June

The last section I have right now is a monthly collage inspired by the groups I’ll be joining here on substack such ’s companion and ’s Considered Life. A monthly collage will be my mood board for a summer well spent in intellectual friendship, joy, and whimsy including things that describe what I want this month to feel like rather than what I want to do. I am going to make these at the beginning of each month and if space allows, add to them as the month goes.

If you are inspired to start a dreamer journal, the monthly collage is where I would tell you to start. It is low stakes, it takes about twenty minutes, and at the end of the month you will have something more interesting to look back on than a task list.

Dreaming in the midst of life

We are very good at convincing ourselves that the dreaming part is optional or over indulgence. We tell ourselves that we will get to it later when things slow down, when the season changes, when we have more time, money and room. We have to decide to make space for dreaming and the interior life in the midst of life, not “after” it.

I would love to know if you build one of your own. What category do you think you would start with first?

Warmly,

Lilly

Month one came and went, and we have entered the next month in our Grand Tour reading. No matter where you are in your reading of The Count of Monte Cristo, I want to remind us that the act of choosing to devote our time to this, and valuing beauty as something to study and take seriously is a paradigm shift that is guaranteed to bear fruit. Every pocket of time that we carve for this is an act of intention that’s moving us toward the life we intended to live, which is worth celebrating.

Thank you for being a part of this community, where we can share in the wonder of learning how to appreciate beauty in literature, art, and goodness.

first impressions

We are at a point in our story we have been left curious about what Dantès will choose to do with the information Abbe Faria has given him, which means I have begun going down a mental rabbit hole, wondering how the knowledge we receive can disorient us and reveal our shallow worldviews, and the roads we are presented with when realizing that the world as we know it does not exist.

As of now in our reading, we have become endeared with the protagonist Edmond Dantès in a way we would a child that accepts every good thing that comes to him as a gift, that fortune belongs to the good, and evil comes only to those who choose it, and we are noticing that this same protagonist is experiencing a fundamental shift in perspective and being given an opportunity few of us get. The opportunity to seek vengeance in just about the most dramatic way possible.

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Most of us absorbed a belief that time only counts if it produces a finished project, a crossed off task, or a skill. We work, and we feel worthy, we rest and we feel guilty and walk away with a sense that we should’ve used the time more “productively".”

I say this to myself as much as to you: play is productive and the belief that it’s a luxury is a poison that we have to challenge. It’s psychologically unhealthy and philosophically mistaken because it gets wrong what being human means.

I recently began reflecting on this when receiving my latest mailing from Poesie Purdue focused on leisure and realized I had a lot to flesh out on my ideas of leisure and play in adulthood.

The original seed was planted to me in college, when I read Josef Pieper’s book Leisure: The Basis of Culture, first published in 1948. Pieper was a German philosopher writing in the aftermath of postwar Europe, a society desperate to rebuild through labor and still his argument was —slow down. A life organized entirely around work misunderstands what makes us human. Spiritually and intuitively, this resonates with me so deeply and activates a sorrow in me that comes with the feeling of knowing the importance of something, and seeing how far removed I am from living it.

the idea we’ve accepted

Pieper discussed a worldview he called total work as a culture that values human beings primarily as workers, and measures time by what it produces. Sound familiar?

We aren’t just overworked, we’ve internalized the logic of work so deeply that it infects everything else. The hobbies we consider become possible side hustles, and rest becomes a way that we recover, so that we can work more. Even how we speak of leisure is infected. We “invest” in relationships and “optimize” our morning routines, we vacation to “recharge.” Framing leisure this way is just fuel for more productivity and there are whole industries that profit greatly from these ideas.

With every new season of my life, the responsibilities adulthood presented felt heavy and serious. Play felt like something that people who took those responsibilities seriously did to selfishly indulge. I won’t go on a tangent, but I want to first mention that that topic is an essay in its own right. I think have gotten play so wrong, that there are examples everywhere of people that stay in a perpetual state of “play” or a perpetual state of “work”. We are all over the place.

The idea that I’ve been ruminating on since reading Pieper's book is that leisure is not the reward for work, it is the foundation of a fully human life. Culture, philosophy, art, worship, and play cannot exist when everything is subordinated to usefulness and the capacity to stop, to wonder, to receive beauty for its own sake is not a luxury, but a necessity for our soul.

Defining leisure

Here’s where Pieper’s ideas inspire me to rethink. We can’t define leisure as anything we do when we aren’t working. It’s not collapsing on the couch or doomscrolling. It’s something more active than that and requires a certain disposition of receptivity.

Pieper writes that leisure is “a mental and spiritual attitude — it is not simply the result of external factors, and not the inevitable result of spare time, a holiday, a weekend or a vacation.” You can be surrounded by free time and still be unable to rest. You can be deeply at leisure in the middle of an ordinary afternoon. This explains the many times I have told my husband that sometimes it feels like I can be given so much alone time and still feel a deficit.

True leisure, in Pieper’s sense, is the willingness to be open to reality, beauty, and presence without needing to control or produce it. It is more a disposition of wonder than idleness. I think of the way a child feels building a sandcastle knowing it will be washed away, or a dog chasing its own shadow.

Pure play is beautiful and good for us and it needs no justification except that it’s delightful, absorbing, or fun.

What happens when we stop playing

“It is a happy talent to know how to play.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

When I have forgotten how to play a feeling of dullness comes over me. I am more irritable, pessimistic, less relational, mean. Things that used to feel interesting no longer spark anything.

According to some research on this, when play is suppressed, we become more rigid, anxious, less creative, and less able to connect with other people. That explains it!

Pieper adds a philosophical dimension by saying that when we stop playing, we stop being able to receive. We become purely instrumental and closed to the kind of experience that makes usefulness worthwhile in the first place.

Permission to do something useless

Louisa May Alcott wrote: “Have regular hours for work and play; make each day both useful and pleasant, and prove that you understand the worth of time by employing it well. Then youth will bring few regrets, and life will become a beautiful success.”

I adore how naturally she pairs useful and pleasant as two things a good day requires in equal measure. Play isn’t the enemy of a well spent life. It’s part of what makes it worth spending.

The invitation is to give yourself permission to do something that has no point, but just because you are a human being, and human beings are not machines, and some things are worth doing simply because they are beautiful or joyful or interesting.

Read a book with no practical application, learn to draw badly, take a walk without tracking your steps, sit in a garden and notice things, build something you’ll take apart, choose a recipe book to cook from just because you’ve been meaning to.

This essay by recently inspired me to take up walking as a form of play. I encourage you to read it, too!

The Culturist

The Ancient Cure for Mental Fog

Friedrich Nietzsche once said to “never trust a thought that occurs to you indoors”. A provocative statement, for sure, but is there any truth to it…

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3 months ago · 519 likes · 27 comments · The Culturist

Consider this your permission to wonder and play for the sake of leisure and beauty.

Warmly,

Lilly