My first journal was a blue coloured diary gifted to me by a close friend. It was the year ’97 and the diary was of ’95. But, it didn’t matter to me. I had an ‘official’ book to write down my thoughts. I was super excited to pen what I did that day. And, so started that day, without even realizing, a love affair of a lifetime. But, my journaling habits were on and off. Sometimes, I would write everyday, sometimes once a week or sometimes neglect it for months together. Recently, I realised it had been a very long time that I had written something. To motivate myself, I walked to my cupboard, opened it and squatted down on the floor. Lined to the wall were fifteen journals, I picked one and started reading. Going through the motives, feelings, thoughts of a younger me made me cry, laugh, hate and love myself at the same time. With each journal I could see myself grow from who I was then to who I am today. I regretted looking at the blank pages. Why didn’t I write then? What might I have lost because of that? A memory? A story? A smile? or a small understanding of myself? I had to write again.
I don’t remember how I got into journalling. But, every night I would open the diary my friend gave me and write. I loved the notion of maintaining a journal, ’cause I always fantasised writing with a quill on a parchment, and a diary and a fountain pen was the closest I came to realising that. In the starting it was more of a daily activity log than anything else. Trying to put thoughts into words was not easy. Conveying emotion in words was not easy. But, slowly I started to question what I was doing & what others were doing. I analysed my decisions, observed people & tried to understand their motivations. The amateur psychologist in me loved what I was doing. It did provide an understanding of my life in relation to others. And, before long, my diary was filled with happenings, observations, thoughts, analysis & emotion. This act of writing down, of seeing my life on a paper (in a sense) has since then been immensely useful in understanding myself better.
When I try to talk my friends into journalling they look at me like a relic from a bygone era. (Come on who dreams of parchments, quills & writing?) So, they ask me why I write? Why should anyone write? I believe the reason is three fold.
To capture, analyze & leave a legacy
- ’Cause the shortest pencil beats the longest memory. We think we’ll remember everything, but few years down the lane memories start to blur and all we can recollect are hazy outlines of the events that happened in our lives. But, true beauty of life lies in the seemingly mundane details of everyday, in the little things – Where was I that day? Why did I do that? How was that feeling of first love? How hard was the breakup? When was that first kiss? etc. These are the memories which remind us who we were once.
“These handwritten words in the pages of my journal confirm that from an early age I have experienced each encounter in my life twice: once in the world, and once again on the page.”1
- ’Cause journaling helps in clarifying our priorities. The act of penning down our thoughts and feelings onto paper provides us a channel to vent out our emotions and bares our life before us. It showcases our life from a third person perspective – the circumstances/stimulus & our reactions to it, enabling us to dispassionately judge the path we chose and subsequently how our life changed & thus learn from it now.
- ’Cause everyday people die, often without leaving a trace of their existence. And, what better way then leave a journal as proof that we once lived, loved & mattered.
“There is, of course, always the personal satisfaction of writing down one’s own experiences so they may be saved, caught and pinned under glass, hoarded against the winter of forgetfulness. Time has been cheated a little, at least, in one’s own life, and a personal, trivial immortality of an old self assured.”2
But, how to journal?
Journaling is not tough as it sounds. Once we find a comfortable medium (paper or digital) to express our thoughts and feelings, start by free writing (there’s no right or wrong way to journal) – don’t analyse if this should be a part of the journal or not, just write. And, like any other task, journaling needs to be practiced. There’ll be resistance initially, and we’d have no idea what to write about or make sense of our thoughts; and putting those jumble of thoughts into coherent sentences turns out to be a harder task than we initially thought. But, as we persevere, we learn to separate the grain from the chaff, to recognize our inner voice from that of the herd. Slowly, we transition from a day-to-day accounting of our life to recording our needs, motivations, questions, dreams, ambitions behind who we were and who we are and probably offer us a glance of who we’ll be in the future. It is ‘our life’ on paper.
1: quote by T.T. Williams
2: quote by A.M. Lindbergh
photo credit: I Need a Pen via photopin (license)
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