A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Doodle

In grade school, my books were filled with scribbles and noodlings including, but not limited to, my own language of music transcription which was based on songs I knew. I would write a string of numbers in correspondence to which finger I was laying down on the fiddle’s fretboard as the song went along. So, of course, the numbers only went from 1-4 with 0 being an open string. For example, one phrase of “Old Joe Clark” would look like this:

01210320121000121032201300

I would write out whole songs, sometimes looping them if I had more than one variation in my head. As you can imagine, the string of numbers would stretch out for quite a while.

In a million years, some evolved life form will see my musical code in an old text book and will deem “Jordan Woods-Robinson – 6th grade” a god.

I’m a doodler. I like to draw in the margins of notes, books, pamphlets, and receipts. I often write notes on the palms of my hands. In college, there would be whole eras missing from my Art History notes because I had started to think about spirals.

It’s harder to doodle on an iPad, which is my primary note-taking medium these days. I have a keyboard. And I don’t doodle in words. I’ve never “riffed” with words like I do with music. They do not flow trippingly off the tongue. Which makes blogging a challenge. A welcome challenge, but a challenge.

So I set out to doodle on the iPad. A call to arms. A blank slate and a free hour to just let my fingers make whatever patterns they wanted and then I’d worry about making sense of them later.

I have a couple different apps that inspire doodling of different varieties and here’s what came out…

Dali’s Dream

Egypt

Jordan as a Dragonball Z character with his talking dog sidekick, Zap

My Hand on a Chalkboard

It’s very freeing to jump into something without knowing how it’s going to end up and simply trusting it will work itself out. Easier said than done, I’m afraid, but the willingness is all we can ever hope for.

Dear Reader: What do you like to do to turn your mind off and just observe? Do you find tasks to be easier when you’re not concerned with making them hit a certain mark?

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