I just started a brand new journal. It is a little intimidating because it is filled with blank pages and I have no idea of how I am going to fill those pages. What will I write about? Why do I bother to write at all? I started journaling when I was first married and wrote so poorly that I threw the first volume in the garbage. For over thirty years I have filled many journals with my thoughts but I know that, eventually, these volumes will probably be thrown away, just like my first one. Still, I enjoy the process and I reward myself by putting my best work on my blog so that friends and family can read it. Once I have found a theme, like triathlon or traveling, I’ll combine several entries and turn them into a book; over the course of the past six years I have written three books and have self published them on Amazon. The hard fact is that very few people have read my blog and even fewer have read my books but my thought is that is alright. As long as I enjoy writing I will continue to journal, even if no one else ever opens the covers.
I only write first thing in the morning because that is when I am fresh and can concentrate. Over the course of the years I have collected a series of hard backed paper journals, to add an air of permanency, and have used the same fountain pen for all of my writing. This pen makes me write slowly and deliberately as I commit my thoughts to paper. I own an iPad but I only use it to type up my entries so that I can upload them onto my blog. It is too easy to delete files or edit entries using a computer; my true feelings would be edited or deleted. Using an old school paper journal keeps me honest because readers could tell if I ripped out pages or scribbled out some thoughts.
Another reason as to why I keep a journal is because I need a place to write down my favorite quotes that I have read in a book or heard in a movie. For example, I stole this quote from “Moneyball” and later adapted it into a paragraph in the journal as an introduction as to why I don’t participate in triathlon any more. “We are all told at a certain time that we can no longer play the children’s game. Some of are told at eighteen and some of us are told at forty, but we are all told.” Another great quote which expressed my fears about how I was going to handle retirement comes from the movie “Inception.” “Do you want to become an old man, filled with regret, waiting to die alone?” This one sentence contains almost all of my fears about aging so it deserved a paragraph. Finally, Mark Twain once said, “I am all for progress. It is change that I don’t like!” This quote doesn’t deserve an entry, or even a paragraph, so I jotted it down in the back of my journal for future reference. Who knows if I would ever be able to use it.
The last reason as to why I write is because I like to pick up my old journals, some of which are thirty four years old, and thumb through the pages. The good, and bad, memories come flooding back and I can relive the emotions that I felt at the time. And because I invested in quality, hard back journals, these volumes look like they were written yesterday and not thirty years ago. My hope is that my children, once I have passed, will thumb through my journals and read about how I felt when they were born or how we celebrated their graduation and wedding days. If nothing else comes from all of the time that I put into my writing then the labor was worth the effort.
