The time to part with my long-used day planner has come. I received it from my wife as a gift. I have already used it past its intended lifespan by ten years or so. It has a leathery texture, owing to all the years of good use.
It has been a constant companion. The inside pockets are filled with things like hospital registration cards, receipts, purikura, membership cards to different shops, addresses, and other items. The whole thing looks quite fat.
It's not even a tool for recording daily information anymore. It has become a repository for my memories. It's like a buddy, always beside me, to whom I can turn and reminisce.
I kept everything that I hesitated to throw away in it. None of its contents, as single objects, are very important. Yet, I treasure them as landmarks to help me remember different stages of my life. For me, the day planner serves as a time capsule: purikura with people whose current whereabouts are unknown, menus of restaurants whose food I can't remember tasting, and postcards announcing changes in address from people whose faces I cannot recall.
As I shift through the contents, nostalgia and memories overwhelm me.
I can’t handle PDAs. I can't really get a sense of organization like I do from a day planner. I need the touch of paper. Because of this, I've never used a PDA.
With paper in front of me, I can freely express my feelings and memories with words, figures, and drawings. Because of how I write and draw in a day planner, I can recall all these things easily. The darkness of a penstroke, the size of the handwriting, the care with which I form my script… a free hand can express many different types of information with different inflections. The digital world cannot replicate this.
My handwriting is ugly, but if I started using a PDA I would probably stop writing physically altogether. Project planning, certifications, and even this blog, all of these things are digitized. The day planner is the last bastion for my personal handwriting.
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