Memory fades with time. How incredible would it be to peek back into previous moments of our lives and replay some detail about what we have been giving our attention to and what were our attitudes during that period of our life.
Keeping a journal is such a versatile tool that I can’t stop myself from recommending it enough. Of course, there are some people, who don’t like to read. Whether that’s a requirement to writing I don’t know. I like to read and always have and feel kind of pity for those who don’t. At the same time I love the versatility of people’s preferences, but still I think there’s so much value in written word. It’s the crystallized thought, focused idea which serves as an insight to our own mind.
What are the benefits of keeping a journal? What are even the different methods of keeping it?
I started writing down ideas and thoughts about my life about ten years ago. First I had a lot of unrelated notes saved on my PC and sometimes in text messages on an old mobile phone. I didn’t not adhere to any structured or periodic writing and wrote whenever I felt inspired to do so. The idea of starting a journal came later on. I was at a point where I thought I was making same mistakes over time. It was confusing as I could not recollect my thoughts from the past. I felt that given the life span we have, we owe ourselves to track the progress we make as a person. More so, some thoughts and situations are so interesting or important that they are worth remembering. There is a sentimental value to the memories too and not everybody would call himself nostalgic. But don’t everybody enjoy looking at an old photo of himself in a situation that long faded but once was the present moment?
Whether words invoke images in everybody’s imagination I don’t know. But then, if we speak of going somewhere and get a description of the whereabouts don’t we all have to build a picture and then compare our vision of that place to what we are seeing?
Why else would we like to keep a journal except to keep a track record of our progress and for sentimental value?
It’s a perfect tool to improve creativity as well as free up our mental resources to increase focus. It is meditation. Few years back I learned about a technique of keeping a journal which purpose is to increase and free creativity and build confidence in our art.
Julia Cameron in her book “The Artist’s Way” has presented a technique called Morning Pages. The rules are simple. Each morning, preferably before we do anything else, we sit down in a quiet place and write three pages longhand consciousness stream. The point is to put pen to paper and continue writing anything without stopping.
It may be not easy to start, but the nature of the mind is that it never shuts up and as soon as we start it will give us plenty more. In fact, if you feel that you don’t know what to write, write exactly that or how you feel about that fact, no matter how ridiculous it seems. What’s interesting that after we continue to write, by the third page we are engaged in some sort of meaningful idea that actually makes sense. Not every day entry will be brilliant, but the point here is that we ground a lot of thoughts that circulate in our mind freeing it to think other thoughts. That’s the meditation part. The second part is that when our mind becomes finally free it becomes playful and gives us ideas that we couldn’t possibly attribute to our own genius (but then why not, that’s the fun of it, we are geniuses).
If you add to that the value of improving your writing skills and a sentimental milestone etched in paper you’ve got one of the most comprehensive holistic multi-tools you could ask for.
You may be thinking whether writing is for you when your craft of choice is pottery. It doesn’t matter whether you are a photographer, sculptor, writer, dancer or guitarist. The benefit of grounding your mind lays in freeing enormous resources that you can then spend on anything you want. Sometimes you’ll voice your worries and it does work as if sharing them with a friend. It takes the load of your shoulders. Gift yourself a fountain pen and good looking notebook and start today. Remember, there’s no tomorrow.
And by the way, I wrote most of this post on paper during eighteen minutes train trip back home plus ten minutes waiting on a platform. I could have been playing Candy Crush Saga. I haven’t even planned or had topic in mind. In fact, these are my today’s morning pages belated to 7pm, see what I mean?
Here’s the link to “The Artist’s Way”. If you happen to buy it through our link we get 5% of the purchase price towards improving the value of Ditch It All. It’s a great book for all creatives that has made a name for itself among successful creatives as much as artistic technique teachers.
Surprise Journal
Just recently I learned about an interesting method of discovering false beliefs and assumptions we hold about ourselves and our environment. At the core of this technique lays note taking of all situations that surprise us serving as an indicator of our misinformed expectations. Read more here.
Dream Journal
A while ago I have been learning about different ways of increasing frequency of lucid dreams. One of the most effective methods I found was keeping a dream journal. Every morning, or better yet, whenever I would wake up I’d note all the details I can remember from my last dream. After several weeks of keeping a record I would be able to start seeing patterns that would then lead me to intuitively pick them up inside the dream leading to a lucid dream awakening.
Combine Them All
Good news is that we can tailor our journal to our needs, using techniques and methods of keeping it to make an ultimate database and tool for self-improvement, brainstorming and mental concept repository without employing multiple notebooks, fancy colour pens and anything else that would unnecessarily add to the complexity of what we want to keep as simple as possible. In yet another inspirational post I learned an extremely simple method of categorising my journal into the subjects of most interest. The idea is simple. On the last page of the notebook we list the categories we find useful to ourselves, each in a separate line. Then whenever we write anything that’s related to that category we colour the edge of that page at the row corresponding to the subject listed on the last page. This way, even if we close the notebook, we can still easily locate entries of interests.
"I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
― Joan Didion