The first and only rule of morning pages is that you must do them every morning – no exceptions. In practice, everyone makes exceptions. But, in the more than 30 years in which Julia Cameron has started her day by writing down three pages of stream-of-conscious thoughts, she has only ever missed one. That was years ago, when she was travelling to New York from her home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, over several flights. Her cherished morning routine was lost in transit. The impact of the disruption is what Cameron, 74, remembers.
“I felt scattered and disorganised, and unable to think clearly,” she says, sounding dismayed all these years later. Then she brightens. “I realised: oh my God, the morning pages really shaped my life.”
