Not long after my retirement in March of 2017, I made a short-lived attempt at what Julia Cameron recommends vis-à-vis her best-selling books, The Artist’s Way and The Right to Write, that being a Morning Pages routine which involves writing, in longhand, three pages each day, every day, preferably first thing each morning.

PSA ~ A Google search of the term ‘longhand’ provides the following description: Ordinary handwriting (as opposed to shorthand, typing, or printing).

Writing, with a pen (or, horrors, a pencil), using one’s own hand on the surface of a clean 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper: What a concept, amiright?

Cursive writing, when your stream of consciousness is babbling at an incoherent rate, makes for some pretty messy scribblings on the page. The anal retentive component of my psychological make-up balks mightily along the way when my thoughts become an erratic composite of loops, lumps and dribbles: virtual screeches against the white, lined notebook paper I’m writing on. My journals over the years, originally all written in longhand, eventually gave way to a neater, tighter script of the printed word so now to revert to cursive has been a bit of a challenge.

But I get it. Printing tidily on the page (remember: anal retentive, here) does lend itself to losing that flash of inspiration that drives someone to preserve their thoughts on paper. In contrast, however, writing in longhand (quickly, so quickly!) helps to scoop it all up (er, down) but where’s the advantage if, upon later inspection, one cannot decipher what one has written?

Hmmmm. What to do, what to do?

Anyway, I’m going to give it another go. Julia recommends a 90-day commitment of Morning Pages, um, paging. With that in mind, I’d best get back to it. Best to strike when the iron, I mean the pen, is hot…