On Keeping a Commonplace Book

The Daily Catch of Happiness with, 'A Life of One's Own' by Marion Milner

It’s a truism that we teach what we most need to learn. I have stumbled and muddled through my life’s decades, gathering and discarding, then gathering again. I learn, I teach - I teach, I learn. I’m never entirely sure in what order this happens, even when I assume the role of teacher or facilitator, but I know that when it is working well it is a circular exchange of energy, of knowledge; never a one-way street.

A creative practice that has been giving me much pleasure over recent months is the keeping of a Commonplace Book, following a suggestion in a post by

Bronwen Tate

. You can read her post at this link. What makes Bronwen’s approach different to most is the inbuilt dialogue, this is what brings it to another level entirely for me.

On the left page I write a quote, a piece that particularly strikes me in the book I’m reading, but I leave the right page blank for now. At some point, maybe fairly immediately, maybe some weeks later, I consider the quote and write a response to it on the right hand page.

I have detailed in this post the genesis of my book, ‘Weather Report’, and it is almost uncanny to me now how a) I brought it into the world and b) only after the fact did it begin to reveal its real power to me, as I did the practices myself day by day¹. Many of the books I have listed as resources at the end of ‘Weather Report’ have provided material for this series of posts on Substack, ‘On Beauty’, where I examine how and in what ways finding beauty in the everyday is of real benefit to us². And through this I have learned so much myself.

A book that is not listed there is Marion Milner’s A Life of One’s Own, written in the 1930s and which I only discovered a few months ago³. As I read Milner’s book, underlining and annotating as I went, I felt a rising excitement as I recognised that almost a century ago Milner had detailed what I was now discovering through the daily practices in my own book, ‘Weather Report’.

So far in my Commonplace Book I have focused on Milner’s book, first published in the 1930s. To respond in this way to a book in which Milner paid attention to her own life in order to learn better how she might ‘get past this blind fumbling with existence’, as she learns that, ‘Writing down my experiences… seemed to be a creative act which continually lit up new possibilities in what I had seen’, feels to me just slightly meta. And I love the practice.

From Milner’s book and the chapter, ‘The Coming and Going of Delight’

Particularly was I struck by the effect of writing things down. It was as if I were trying to catch something and the written word provided a net which for a moment entangled a shadowy form which was other than the meaning of the words. Sometimes it seemed that the act of writing was fuel on glowing embers, making flames leap up and throw light on the surrounding gloom, giving me fitful gleams of what was before unguessed at. (p.55)

Maybe it’s my dawning realisation that I get to decide what is beautiful on a daily basis, and what a wonderful power that is. I randomly flick through my entries in ‘Weather Report’ and find these: ‘The red-handled floor mop that J inserted into the green fencing near the back door to dry after use and there it stays, poised, until it’s next needed.’ And, ‘Pennywort growing in the crevices of the cemetery wall. Green and resourceful, succulent and flourishing despite the arid nature, the impossible nature surely, of its home.’

I, who have lived in this place, this valley for most of my life, for decades, can still be surprised and delighted by the smallest thing. What Milner calls the ‘daily catch of happiness.’ I love the implication in that phrase of being actively out in the world, ‘fishing’ for happiness. Here’s another of my recent ‘catches’: the young boy, at a guess no more than fourteen, in his black and white school uniform, who raised his arm and saluted his thanks to the bus-driver not once but twice as the bus-driver paused to allow him walk across the road to the Carrick-Beg steps.

Back when I was teaching in a conventional college classroom and trying to guide students towards being active learners rather than passive vessels, I used to write ‘taking notes’ on the whiteboard and then draw a line through the ‘t’ and change it to ‘making notes’. I wanted to encourage them to experience writing as a tool for thinking, as a means of wrestling with the not yet understood, to get below the surface, to leave the shore of certainty. What a lot I was expecting from first year undergrads! My apologies to you all from this vantage point. I can see now that I was attempting to teach what I most needed to learn.

An earlier post in this series you might enjoy:

1. I have stacks and shelves of notebooks filled with various journaling practices over many years, so I’m no stranger to making discoveries on the page.

2. We would all agree on a beautiful sunset, or as recently, sightings of the Aurora Borealis, even here in Ireland. These bring a sense of awe, take us ‘out of ourselves’ in a most wonderful way. But training myself to find beauty in every day, to write it down, has been the most transformative. ‘Fuel on glowing embers’ indeed. ‘Fitful gleams’, oh yes!

3. Through Maria Popova’s wonderful The Marginalian