Bullet Journaling

The Highly Recommended Bullet Journal

Begin at age 8. By 18 they will either love it or leave it.

Mindfulness will have happened regardless

Bullet Journal 

VS

Reflective Journaling

The two can easily be combined or NOT.

But helping our children learn how to think about their own personal relationship with time, things that they have the power to choose to be important:  goals and priorities, as well as learning to reflect on their feelings and self-awareness are all necessary skills in our diverse, globally-large world.  

Strategic Tool:

How To Bullet Journal

Your child/children will need to give meaningful thought and time to self-definement.  There was a day - not all that long ago, when the culture about you did much of the work of self-definement.  The culture brought meaningful definitions to you.  Even if you were one spending time defying these definitions, those definitions (the ones the culture gave) were, nonetheless, the definitions that you were busy defying.

This is not the case now. 

Self-awareness.  Self-commitments.  Clear understanding of how we are pursuing our own personal, prioritized  journey of becoming. Are all essential to self-definement. 

And they require informed WHYs to stand the test of time for meaning and its promised satisfaction. 

Christian faith is therefore an essential ingredient in  helping explore these thoughts/potential.  [Potential - as always,  a great word study]. 

Christianity is a faith of praxis.  Convictions brought to life in action.  Scripture clearly gives testimony to this reality.  Therefore, in light of Christ,  self-definement is a process that must necessarily continuously  be faced.  Confronted.  Clearly, verbally defined.   Addressed. ...

Who is it that  I desire to be?  Feel that I am created  to be?  Called to be? 

And then, how do I be her?  How do I be him? 

Put more simply, How do I live in such away that I am ever in the midst of the process of becoming more of who it is that I want to be?  And do so graciously?  Non-legalistically.

Tricky stuff.

So many options.

In the vast sea of possibility, where does my actuality reside.  To whom is it listening?  With whom is it agreeing?  To whom (or even, what) is it orienting?

Again, How is it lived?

As addressed elsewhere, this is very much the stuff of Deuteronomy Six.

Loudly and Clearly,
REMEMBER who you are and how that works itself out in day to day living.   

Again, What will define you as a people?  What will you value?  Whose behavior will you be following?  What are the things that you will be purposefully reflecting?  The options are myriad.

It is the stuff of MEANING.

Furthermore, 

Meaning Must Be EXPRESSED! 
As in Seen.

The unexpressed is not real. 

And I don't simply mean the unexpressed that is NOT lived out is not real.  

I mean:  the unexpressed.  

Not photographed.  Not posted.  Not seen.  

Is not REAL.

Reality today needs to be seen.
Reality is the expressed.  The clearly denoted.  The shared.

I am who I show you I am.  And I stand by this I am.  Because, it is who I am.

In fact, I am defined by my doing in some significantly real ways.

These are strange words for a modernist such as myself to write.  The 20th Century's  most beloved literature often involved the reflective person, observing the unseen and making it seen.  The realness was existential.  Deeper, my biased self would say.  The whole endeavour was beautifully subtle, my nostalgic self would say.  Not too much.  Not too loud.  Unseen heartbreak.  Unseen loneliness.  The unseen forgotten, brought to life via pen and paper that they now be known.  A gift conferred from outside.   (This is easily seen in Faulkner, O'Connor, Steinbeck and the beautiful, final statement of life in the midst of plight that Grapes of Wrath gives to its reader.  Existence that defies seenness.)

We, however, no longer live in a subtly observing age.  Rather,  today is all about the seen.  The seen as real.  The seen as loud.  The seen to be commented about.  We observe in order to critique (or perhaps, confirm).  Either way, we do so loudly.  And quite often, rather self-righteously.  Self as our favored reference point.  

Therefore, it can easily be a lonely age in which, when unseen, we are not confident in our own realness.  My self-reference point needs you to see it to be real.  You don't even have to agree.  Life lived in the cross-hairs - a violent image, but I can think of no other as clear.  We are all  Katniss battling clear injustices with clear, vicious enemies.

So, then, there is the push to love hard and love loudly by those who love us most.  My love can make sure you know that you are real  - because I see you and celebrate you.

We place words regarding love and family and friends all around us.  Reminders that we are not alone.  That we are seen.  In family, if no where else.  Because beyond the realm of immediate, is an even louder, quick to condemn, bullying world whose  pending vicious words we easily sense.  Conform or suffer.   Even as songs are sung, defiantly, in our corporate soul  not to listen to the condemning words - defy these words that call to conform.  But often the singers who are singing the songs to resist, are themselves, condemning all that is not like them.  Those  thinking differently than me and my young are not simply thinking differently but are definitionally vicious.  That is the only reason for a persons thinking differently than my gracious, accepting way of thinking.  Two types of people.  Two.  People who think like me.  And haters.  Those who hate.  The ones who do not think like me.    Again, the  necessarily vicious.  All divergent opinion is the Capitol, seeking our death.  Therefore, worthy of our stoic vitriol.   (We have, all of us, barely escaped their cruel intentions of devour!!!)  But now, all the stronger, overcomers that we are, we can sing the song inviting you in freedom to think just like me.  The right way. The better way.  The only way.  (or else you are a really, really bad person - don't forget - cause I will remind you with my very large microphone and my even larger eraser....)

And in the snap of a decade, we have lost any cultural cohesion to the loudest (often, most famous) bullies decrying bullying.  Bullying via their hatred of bullying.   Preaching to the masses   'Know your own worth', while all other systems of worth are demonized.  Definitely diminished.  Swallowed whole by their own late night self-aggrandizement. 

Growing up in this sea of  more and less significant people, who have, seemingly, no eyes to see, a person needs to shore up her inner self.   Know your own rules of engagement before others preach them to you. 

I actually see this as a new feudalism of the soul.

The re-making small of people.  Even as they do not perceive it.  Your life becoming all about their life.  And their lives gladly perpetuating, catering to your doing so.

And that is why  U.S. history and its foundational precursors become essential learning.  Why  the United States of America needs to remember her better angels, as it were.  Not  so much for who she was - but, rather,  for who she wasn't. 

When I was young and visited Europe and Britain, people reading about other people's lives as headlines was odd to me.  Americans did not want so much to follow the lives of other people. (Not that there weren't pockets doing so, but not our news).   No, U.S. citizens were still rebellious enough that they wanted to live their own lives -  even if they were foolish enough to put margarine on toast and eat American cheese and drink dirty water for coffee.

Not so much now.

Instead we have shifted to become a deeply followy people.  Even abusive in our Defending the ones we follow - as if our own worth were an appendage of they.

But somewhere in the midst of it all, we hear Jesus say...

Call no man Father

Watch out for your allegiances...

Bullet Journaling - a way to empower intentional orientations

Call no man (nor woman) father.  Don't give a rightful place of self-definement to unworthy persons who would gladly have you follow them.  Though unable to care personally for your soul.  They may love you in mass.  It may be lovely to be a part of that which they are. 

But you my dear are an essential person.  An intentional and well-intended singular creation, the likes of whom there is no other.  Watch out for selling short your birth right for a lesser cup of soup - no matter how much you love its taste.  Watch out for who it is that is influencing you.  

Influencers.  A current common term.

Rather, with fore-sight determine your influencers.  Be your own best influencer.  Take time to be proactive as to that which influences your real-time journey of becoming.  Don't entrust this process to any other than your heavenly Father.

Learn to start your day solely in the presence of God's word and loving kindness. 

And then learn to carve out time, daily as well, for self-reflection and intentional-mooring to the things that you have deemed most-important.  In fact, the mundane act of deeming things important, is essential today.  Otherwise, others will be doing so for you, in spite of your own thoughts or God-given inclinations. 

There is a pull toward passivity, skirting in and about  (through)
all of our lives

A million less than consequential things beckon you daily.  Posers who take themselves very, very seriously (be they the thoughts of others or another's life journey) , can, before you know it, become somehow the legacy of your own soul.  Squatters on the landscape of your own essential becoming.

Yuck!

Even as schools are celebrating AGENCY as loudly as Aristotle himself.  (to act intentionally is to act for a reason:); we seem to be sacrificing the long fought  and hard earned sense of  agency having meaning at the individual level to  the historically familiar and inherently class ordered reductionistic understanding of agency surrendered to other.

Thus, the new feudalism of the soul.

Defy, I cry.  I cry, Defy.

Rather ... take time and define:)

Some refer to this journey of self-definement as mindfulness.  A term that makes sense to me.  However,  I see it as much more.  Especially in light of Christianity's understanding of Telos .  The greek word for end or final as in fulfillment.  Fully realized purpose.

Scripture is vibrant with words regarding fulfillment.  A rejoicing  as we move toward the purposes for which we are created.  God sees us verdant-alive in the midst of the very good works He delightfully imagines us pursuing, as his own, highly-personal, deeply-intentional, breath-breathed word of life, creates us.  

No circular, random, haphazard becoming are we.

No perpetual 'Oops, I should have,' are we. 

Nope.  We are creations created for eternal-worthy, God-delighting endings; in the midst of which we find  God smiling upon us in pleasure  for the joy of seeing Himself fully alive in and through us.  Many parents know the foretaste of this delight.

Christ's death upon the cross has granted us extreme grace as empowering insulation against our own failure and lack of confidence.  Grace works so powerfully in our favor in the midst of moments in which we fail and fall down, that Paul has to tell us:  don't sin all the more.  It could become tempting.  We can abuse this crazy, radical grace.  Grace that kindly defies the law so that we need not live our lives stuck in the rut of our own inadequacies, fears, betrayals, doubts and temptations.  They do NOT get to name us.  Be the thing we become. Nope.  Not meant to determine us are they. (Even as we feel their ugly nearness.  In the words of Ms. Beyonce:  "You don't know a thing about me,"  we speak back.  I'm not defined by you.  Even in the midst of my extraordinary weakness.  Martin Luther - really was good at defying such shaming voices.  'I am baptized," he would inform the mocking fears in the very act of their mockery...)

It is against the backdrop of this bold truth:  God so very much for us that we are not able to stand against, even, ourselves - our own habits of contempt;  that both approaches to journaling (bullet/organizational and emotional/reflective) bring truly important freedom to our children in the day to day analysis of their own  worth and consequence.

Elsewhere I write about acedia.   The very common and constant beckoning of  acedia to mute human presence  is  an important awareness to walk in.  My favorite writer about it is Josef Pieper.  But I do not find him an easy read.  One, rather, where the first few encounters invite an awakening that , for me, only sheer determination, can unwrap.  However, the ability to say so much so-very-transcendent is a life giver for this, often discouraged, and therefore  desperate-for-vital-purpose-proclamation, seeker. 

Acedia is the opposite of mindfulness.  It is actually forgetfulness.  Forgotten Imago Dei.  And all the beauty that lies within that claim of truth upon human lives.  Created children in whom more than mere possibility resides.  Rather, definitional promises have been sung over every single creation.  At the heart of  our God-breathed inception.  This divine knowledge is best understood as essential to our understanding of self.  And likewise, it is what makes dancing with the definitional daily so very consequential to the lives of those we love.  Breathing reminders of becoming into the beauty of our own Imago Dei that  relevance and impact - meaning; overtake the flirtatious allurement of the  inconsequential and its despotic call to lesser things,  easier things, irrelevant things as somehow fulfilling.

Not talking about relaxing.  Talking about avoiding.  Skirting.  Diminishing.  Birth right for soup. Easier to hide potential  than risk loss.  Determined disenchantment forgetting Deuteronomy's frequent call to rejoice in rememberance.

All Things Bullet Journal

I would very much pursue this practice.  It deeply ties in to Deuteronomy 6:7 ff.

For a discussion on  non-Bullet-Journaling go here.

Doodling can impact memory.  Some research has shown that drawing items on a list results in better recall than simply writing them down.