Simple “Totems”

A few years ago I finally started to “get my act together” … kind of.

I built a morning routine. I stopped wasting a bunch of time on news and video games. I started to break out of my cycle of intense discipline throughout the week and then drinking and having “too much fun” on the weekend.

Still made a bunch of mistakes, still had a lot of down days, but less “down weeks.”

For all of the meditation, and amazing books, and better eating, and journaling, and other things I changed, there was one really simple one that I really didnt even notice.

I just started carrying around a pretty nice cross pen every day. Most days I clip it to my shirt. I lose it every once and a while, and once a year it goes through the wash which results in a not so great convo with my better half. But every day, I have that pen on me.

Some days it is a silver pen, some days it is a black pen. But it’s always there for the last 3 years. When it’s not there, something feels really off. Sometimes I go crazy if I cant find a pen, so I started keeping a few backups.

Quite different from 5 years ago.

Reading a book about Jesse Livermore, one of the most famous stock traders of all time, he mentions very specifically “keep a small notebook” to record your thoughts. This is something I actually started doing a year ago as well. You could easily type notes into your phone, but something about pulling out that pen and small notebook, helps cement an idea.

I wonder if the act of just carrying around the notebook, much like a pen, was important to Livermore. If it helped keep him grounded. If it put his brain in a certain setting, where he wouldnt need to first find a piece of paper or setting to keep a new thought, and he was more free to just watch and think.

These simple totems seem to show up a lot lately. A turtle I keep on my desk as I write my first book. The pen that is so contanst that my daughter asks, “can I borrow your good pen,” instead of “do you have a pen?”

I always have a pen, and a small notebook. Maybe some people have a totem as an app in their smartphone, or a picture in their purse. Maybe a dollar bet they won with a brother or sister a long time ago, neatly folded up in a wallet.

But there is something to be said about the phyicallity of always having the object. The constant of it. Instead of trying to hold a memory, do you keep a rock or shell from that beautiful beach. Do you keep a leaf folded up in a journal.

Do totems allow new memories to be created? New thoughts? Why keep a pen, unless you plan to write and create. Why keep a notebook, unless you realize there are patterns to the stock market that you need to capture to be a great trader.

Great thoughts come and go. But the system to allow them, and capture them, feels new to me now. Sometimes they are absent, and it feels like they will never return. Sometimes I feel like Guy Pearce in the movie Momento, and a great idea only lasts for about 6 minutes until it is quickly forgotten. But the pen waits for them anyway, in the same spot on my shirt, no matter how sunny or cloudy the day.

SDM – 1.13.19