A few days ago, a reader wrote me a letter I keep thinking about.
She told me she finds it very hard to throw things away. Papers, notes, old letters: each one feels too important to let go, so they stay, and they pile up.
And then she told me something that stopped me. That was the reason she was hesitant to start using her notebook. Every page she wrote would become one more thing she couldn't part with. Before she had written a single word, the notebook already felt heavy.
I read her email twice, because I understood her more than I expected to.
There's something about a page we've written by hand that makes it hard to throw away. It isn't just paper. It holds a Tuesday when we were tired but kept going, a plan we were excited about, a worry we finally wrote down so we could sleep. Our handwriting is a little piece of us. Throwing the page away can feel like throwing away that moment, or that version of ourselves. Somewhere underneath there's a quiet fear: if I let this go, will I forget? Will it be as if it never happened?
So I wrote back to her. Not with rules, but with what I've slowly learned myself.
Most of the pages we write are like scaffolding. They're there to hold us up while we build something: a day, a week, a goal. A to-do list has done its whole job once the day is over. It helped us get through, and what it gave us, the things we did, the things we learned, is already inside us. The page can go, and none of that goes with it.
I told her what I do at the end of each two-week cycle. I sit down with my reflection page and write what really mattered: what moved forward, what didn't, one moment I want to remember. That page I keep. The rest I can let go of, because their story has already been told. And for the pages that still feel hard, I take a photo first, or put them in a dated envelope for a month. Time does a lot of the letting go for us.
But the more I wrote to her, the more I realised this was about more than paper.
Letting go of a page is a small practice for something much bigger. Life keeps asking us to let go: of plans that changed, of seasons that ended, of versions of ourselves we've grown out of. We can't hold on to everything, and when we try, there's no room left for what's coming next. The Stoics used to say that nothing truly belongs to us except the way we live right now. I think of that every time I lift an old page off the discs.
Throwing away a finished page is a way of saying: that happened, it mattered, and I trust that it's part of me now. It's a quiet act of trust that we don't need to keep the proof of our lives to know that we lived them.
That's one of the things I love about a disc-bound notebook. Pages come in and pages go out. Nothing is sewn in forever. It isn't meant to be an archive of everything you've ever written. It's meant to hold only what you're living right now, and stay light enough to carry.
I asked her to write back after her first cycle and tell me how it felt. I hope she does.
And if you've ever hesitated to start a fresh notebook because it felt too precious, too permanent or too much, I hope this gives you permission to begin.
You can always let the pages go later. You'll keep what mattered.
Until the next page,
Alice
