Journal

Just over 30 days ago I wrote a post about spending part of my lunch break making a small piece of art. A couple of days later I committed to making a small piece of art for at least 30 days. Yesterday I made my 30th piece of art and stuck it to the wall next to my desk.

If I’m honest (with myself), I’ve always considered myself to be an artist. Making art has always made things feel a little lighter; always nourished my soul. I got into art school off the back of my stack of sketchbooks. In practicing design, I’ve always believed that there’s art to it, despite the protests from peers in the design world.

Making art for myself over the past few years has felt like a luxury though. Something that I’d do if only I had more time; if only I was less tired. I’ll do it when I’m between jobs, I thought. I’ll do it when I get a free weekend. I’ll do it; I promise I’ll do it.

A few weeks ago, I looked down at a pile of things on my desk half-way through writing my morning pages, and my eyes rested on a book of poems that had made its way to the top of the pile: Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara. Frank wrote most of these poems whilst taking a lunch break during his day job at the MoMA in New York.

If Frank could do it, I wondered, why couldn’t I?

It turns out, of course, that I could. It turns out that we waste many more minutes a day on mindless nothingness that many of us could repurpose for something greater. That I could repurpose. I set myself some rules and got to work—every day for the past 30 days. If Frank had Lunch Poems, I had Lunch Makes. A small something, just for me.

The wonderful thing about committing to 30 days of something is that you don’t want to stop when the time comes—and I’m not going to. Making art every day feels like part of my day now. Part of my life. I think it would feel weird if I ended the day not having made something.

I did the same with morning pages, and have now written them every day for many months. I did the same with publishing daily blog posts, and I’m sat here writing a post that’s a good leap past number 30. All three things probably take me about an hour (collectively) each day, but they feel like such a big part of my life.

The small things add up. If I swivel my chair I’m faced with a wall of art. If I open my website my finger gets tired scrolling to the bottom. If I look at a graph of my journal, it feels like a complex galaxy. After a single day they all looked a little pathetic, but the days add up.

So, I’m adding art-making to the set of things that I do every day to nourish my soul, and to reconnect myself with the artist that I’ve always been. If you’ve been wanting to explore your art, take this as a nudge to start today—just with something small; just for you.

I want to capture more of my memories (at least, how I remember things). I always think I’ve lived in a peculiar number of houses, so as a strange little exercise I’m going to try to capture one memory from each. Let’s just tackle the first 10 houses today, back for more later.

1. Maple Avenue: we’d play in the front garden during the summer and run furiously for the pop man when he drove down our street. I liked dandelion and burdock (and orangeade, and limeade), but really I think I just liked sugar and the thrill of overwhelming choice.
2. Perdiswell Street: me and my sisters had a club called “scavenger club,” where we’d explore the house and garden to find little treasures (like, you know, rocks and stuff). We stored them in luminous wrist-pouches that came free in a box of Cheerios breakfast cereal.
3. Northwick Avenue: my father set up the most elaborate easter-egg hunt, and we invited my school friend Jenny to join us on the hunt. It felt magical to live right next to a school friend at that age. I didn’t know that they really existed outside of the school gates.
4. Leslie Avenue: We had the longest garden I’d ever seen (which probably wouldn’t seem quite so long now). It had trees that I loved to climb. Not very big ones, but big enough to say that you’d climbed a tree, and that’s roughly 30% of what young boys want to say.
5. New Street: we lived above a restaurant housed in a (very wonky) early 18th century building. It had tiny windows that I loved staring out of, watching people walk up and down the street below. I felt so high up, even though it was probably just three stories.
6. Turner Close: my father told us that we didn’t have enough money for Christmas presents. On Christmas morning, we unwrapped a gift from his boss—bicycle accessories. After putting things in our bedrooms, we descended the stairs to see brand new bikes.
7. Blackpole Road: we’d buy groceries at the Sainsbury’s about 10 minutes walk away. My father would push them home in the shopping trolley because we din’t have a car. If my sister and I took it back to the grocery store, we could keep the pound coin in it.
8. Blakefield Walk: the loft was being converted into a bedroom and I was told that I could have the room. The offer was taken back (very reasonable) and for some reason I was given a PlayStation as consolation (unreasonable). I mostly used it to watch DVDs.
9. Newport Road: I lived with a school friend for a year, and most of it was spent partying. For some reason, he liked making egg mayo (like, a lot of it), so most of our drunken and/or hangover food was egg mayo sandwiches. The best and the worst, somehow.
10. Upper Tything: first place of “my own”—a little flat above a charity shop. It was another old, wonky building and the bathroom door was half the width of all the others so they could fit a bath in. Back when it was built, baths were in the living room (if you had one).

For some reason, I’ve always enjoyed bringing up the fact that Alex Tew, the co-founder of popular mindfulness app Calm, is also the creator of the (amazing, majestic, chaotic) Million Dollar Homepage.

I love this narrative arc for so many reasons, but for now I’ll note my top three, and I suspect I could write a lengthy blog post on each of these.

1. Not thrilled about the idea of student debt, Alex reportedly wrote down “how to make a million dollars” before coming up with ideas. He of course did make a million dollars. What if he’d written down “how to make a thousand”, or even “how to make a hundred million?”
2. Before there was Calm, there was a simple website, which only functioned to help you pause for 2 minutes. If you moved your mouse, the timer would reset. You simply stared at a picture of the ocean, listening to the sound of waves. Big ideas start as small ideas.
3. The main alternative to Calm is Headspace. Andy, the founder of Headspace, trained as a monk for a decade. Alex… also meditated. There are many paths to the same destination. You don’t have to train as a monk to champion mindfulness (but I do fucking love that).

I sit down and write morning pages every day. Occasionally, I’ll run Claude Code against my local Obsidian Vault (where I write my morning pages) to see if it can help me understand the common themes that I’ve been thinking about, or to suggest things that I could write about.

Whilst it’s rarely helpful in a practical sense, I do find myself surprised from time to time by what it gathers of me. The first couple of times I chalked it up to “LLM bad”, and assumed that it had hallucinated some details that weren’t really there. That is, until I checked.

It turns out that I write about things that I completely forget having written about. Sometimes, I write about those things a lot. Sometimes I’ll stop writing about it, only for it to pop up again weeks or months down the line. Who was that person, I wonder, who wrote those things.

I wonder that because… well… that’s how it feels. If I don’t remember writing it, perhaps it’s because I didn’t. Perhaps I’m someone else now, even if temporarily. Perhaps I’m not someone, but many someones. Perhaps I’m all of those someones at once, or just one at a time.

In the western world, we think so much about the self. We are, largely, self-centered (derogatory), and occasionally we’re self-aware, and unfortunately self-conscious. We center the self so frequently, but I’m not sure I could tell you much about myself, because it feels too singular.

Even that word, myself—as if it’s mine, as if there’s one. I heard Elizabeth Gilbert refer to Internal Family Systems (IFS) as “group therapy for one”, and that felt right to me. There’s a group in there, and one, some or all of them might sit down to write morning pages.

There’s been lots written about this, of course, but I’m not trying to parrot back the things I’ve read. I’m trying to actually think about how I feel, regardless of whether there’s prior art or not. Regardless of whether there’s ancient wisdom or not. Just actually sitting with it.

I’ll write more about this later maybe, but a silly Claude Code session served as a visceral reminder today, and I wanted to capture the thought before it slipped away. If you journal on your computer, I recommend running the same experiment and seeing what you learn.

A few years back I wrote a post about buying more books. At the time I’d created all sorts of arbitrary rules for buying books, but I’d like to re-state the case with fewer rules and fewer words.

Buy more books.

That’s it. That’s the whole message. I just think that you should buy more books. That everyone should. Most books are remarkable value for money and the right one can change your life. A few have changed mine.

Unfortunately, you can’t know ahead of time which books will change your life. Yours specifically. You can search for “life-changing books,” sure, but that rarely works. Life-changing for who exactly?

The only way to know if a book might change your life is to read it, and a great way to read a book is to buy it. If you don’t want to (or can’t), checking more books out of the library is great, too. Better even.

Owning more books is great. You don’t even have to read them, at least not all of them. You certainly don’t have to finish those you start. If you’re interested, buy the book. You never know where it might lead.

After I finish a draft of a post, I’ll read it out loud a couple of times. I find that reading my work out loud helps to improve how it’s written.

On this blog, I don’t often edit much. My goal (as you might know) is simply to publish every day—not to polish posts forever beforehand. For other work though, I might read it out loud tens of times.

There’s something humbling about thinking that you’ve nailed a piece of writing, only to stumble over every other sentence as you read it out loud. It helps you to write how you speak, and that’s the kind of writing I most enjoy reading. To hear it in the author’s voice.

To practice on a recent blog post though, I made a rough a ready recording to see where I stumbled. I did a couple of times, and I ended up just changing it a bit (in the spoken version only). Most of my blog posts are very short, so reading it took just a couple of minutes.

I have a note stuck to my display that says “make something every day and share it”, and whilst I share my writing and art every day, I thought I’d share this too. You can listen to it on the web for now, and I’ll update the post when it’s live on common podcast directories.

Listening back a couple of times, I can spot all of the places that I might change both how I wrote the piece and how I performed it in spoken-word. That’s why I love this blog though—it’s the cutting room floor for the things that I might publish later, inspired by posts.

If you read or listen to the piece, I’d love to hear about it—and if you’ve recorded spoken-word versions of your own writing, I’d love to hear about it even more (even and especially the rough cuts).

The first time I remember going to London as a young child—maybe even my very first trip—we went to visit Santa at Selfridges.

“And what would you like for Christmas?” he asked.

“A car,” I replied (confidently).

“You want a toy car?” he chuckled (stupidly).

“No… a real one,” came my (obvious) answer.

“I’ll see what I can do.” (no chuckle.)

(He did not do well.)

A couple of days back I read The Smoker—an essay written by Ottessa Moshfegh and published in The Paris Review. Actually, I first listened to the author read it on The Paris Review podcast, and was so enthralled that I had to go and read it (and re-read it), too.

It’s a short essay, and it feels even shorter than it is somehow. I think that’s because the bit that makes you really feel something is just a few words, but it needed the other words to set it up. Some of those words feel like they exist just to give you a moment to get ready.

Some parts of the essay have absolutely no right to be interesting, but somehow they are. They pull you along just a little bit further.

The layout of the house was nothing special. When you walked through the front door, you could go up the staircase on the left. Or you could walk straight down the hall, past the small living room, to the kitchen, and from the kitchen you could take a u-turn and step down to the side-door to the driveway, or continue on down to the basement.

That’s barely taken out of context, to be honest. The most normal description of the layout of a house, but somehow it pulls you along. It reminds me of Ira Glass stating that a great story simply needs momentum. It just needs to keep leading you somewhere.

The story told in that essay could have happened to anyone. Many folks would simply have said, “huh, that was strange” and moved on with their life. Perhaps retold it at the housewarming. It’s a small moment of many that could have slipped by unnoticed, but thankfully it didn’t.

That’s the power of a great personal essay to me. A little vignette that captures something meaningful in the almost-mundane. A story that makes you feel something when you read it. It could be a few hundred words but land harder than some of the best books you’ve read.

The Smoker is a perfect example of this. A short, personal essay that captures a small, meaningful moment. I’d encourage you to read it—it’s worth the handful of minutes that it will take you.

Most of the posts on this blog aren’t very good. I don’t say that to put myself down, and if your opinion is different that’s (obviously) fine by me. The thing is, I’m totally fine with it, because the purpose of this blog—the one you’re reading right now—is simply to post every day.

I think of this blog not as some repository of great writing, but as a very public scratchpad. A place to capture thoughts, opinions and little vignettes of personal life. Really, I think of it as a place to plant seeds, but I don’t require that those seeds grow into much—not here at least.

There are things I’ve written about that I’d almost forgotten, and certainly would have if I didn’t write them down. Sometimes that matters, and sometimes it absolutely doesn’t. I’ll be glad to relive happy memories down the line. I’ll be happy to forget silly opinions.

Some of the seeds I’ve planted so far I hope to grow into essays, short stories, and maybe even a book some day. I want to push them around the page and dig into my memory a bit more and (when the story warrants it) make a few things up—because the truth shouldn’t ruin a good story.

I’ll note a few of the posts that I could imagine growing into something else below. I’m doing this right now, right after I type these words, so my opinion could change tomorrow. Today though, right now, these are a few of the posts that make me feel a little something.

• On a Rock by the Ocean
• The Echo of Lost Words
• As We Change
• Work in Progress
• Nervous Twitches
• London, England

One of the useful and unexpected side-effects of creating art every day and sticking it to the wall is that it slows down time. The days can blend together—a day becomes a week, a week becomes a month. When you have evidence of your existence every day, that happens a little less.

If I spin on my chair by 90 degrees, I’m faced with half of a (small) wall covered in art that I’ve made. It reminds me that for each of those days, I made something. I did something small for myself. Something I’m proud of. Some of them take 10 minutes, but that doesn’t matter.

A year from now, they won’t all fit on the wall. They won’t fit across all of the walls in my small office. I’ll have a stack of art that I won’t know what to do with. A small mountain of things that I made, just because. I feel a strange sense of pride and energy just thinking about it.

When time feels like it’s slipping by too quickly, I’ll walk into my office and look at the walls. I’ll remind myself that each piece marks a day that I existed—that I did more than exist, actually. I made a mark—figuratively and literally—on my own small part of the universe.