March has been a busy month for me and I haven’t spent as much time on the blog as I would have liked (despite all the time I blocked off for it on my ideal schedule, which I have yet to stick to for even a week lol). I want to catch you up on everything I’ve been up to, but seeing as it’ll soon be April, I’ll save that catch up for my March In Review. For now, I want to share about an awesome, inspiring space I visited three days ago that I think deserves its own post: The Sketchbook Project at the Brooklyn Art Library.
The Sketchbook Project at the Brooklyn Art Library is a library of sketchbooks. How it works is that people can buy blank sketchbooks from the library, take them home, fill them in, and mail them back to join the collection. There are over 41,000 sketchbooks from over 130 countries in the collection, and visitors can browse them by searching keywords/themes on the iPads they have in the library, and then selecting sketchbooks to have the librarian pull off the shelves for you to flip through in-“store.” When finished, you can return the sketchbooks to the baskets they have at the reading tables, and the librarian reshelves them.
If you’re not in Brooklyn, they also have a digital library you can browse.
Libraries are such a special place. They’re one of the few places in the world where you’re invited to stay as long as you want without having to buy anything. They’re not about taking from you, but about sharing with you.
But what I loved especially about this sketchbook library was how it encouraged presence. You can’t check out these sketchbooks, so you take your time with them right there in the library. It’s not like the typical library or bookstore where you flip through the first few pages or chapters of a book to figure out whether you want to bring it home to finish it off, and then move right onto finding the next potential book to take home.
As I’ve been working on growing my design portfolio, this visit to the sketchbook library was hugely inspiring. I noticed that there were different kinds of sketchbooks. Some were like storybooks, with illustrations and text, the next page depicting the next scene. Some were thematic around the subject of the sketches. Some were thematic around the style of the sketches. Some were collaborative — each page filled in by a different person, sharing their own take on a theme.
Flipping through these sketchbooks was such a present, slow, wholesome experience.
Slow living… Isn’t that a weird thing to call it? Slow? Isn’t it weird that taking life at the pace you need is considered slow?
Yeah yeah, it means *something along the lines of* slowing your life down relatively to the overwhelming pace it’s at — perhaps to live slower, not slowly — but still. Calling it “slow living” and focusing on the slow… I don’t know how I feel about that.
If you’re taking something at your own pace, and no one else’s, how can it be too fast or too slow?
Take the time you need at your own perfect pace. Tune into yourself. Trust yourself. Be present. You got this.
28 Frost Street
Brooklyn, NY 11211