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Journaling Experiences and Events
How did you spend your day yesterday? When was the last time you went to see a movie? Can you remember the plot line? What did you do on your last vacation? Did you enjoy a particular meal, or visit a special tourist site that meant something special to you? While none of the answers to these questions matter in the overall scheme of life, they are a part of your life, and may very well matter to you at some point in time.
Learning to journal our experiences, and the special events in our lives can teach us about the fluidity of daily situations, how they fit together, and how they impact each other. Through journaling our experiences we can make connections to and through the flow of our lives. Perhaps as a child you always spent Thanksgiving at your grandparents' house, saw aunts, uncles, cousins and assorted friends and neighbors around the holiday table. Although you enjoyed the experience, each Thanksgiving as an adult has a certain poignancy about it on which you just can't place your finger. Taking time to journal through the next Thanksgiving Day, the day after the festivities are complete, may help you make connections about your present feelings and how they are associated with the holiday. Did you have people come to your home this year, or did you visit someone else's home? Or maybe you gathered friends together and celebrated at a favorite restaurant, then came home for dessert. Was the day relaxed or stressful? Was the weather warm and bright, or cloudy and damp? Were you excited about the day, or dreading it for weeks prior? Now, you can start with these most recent experiences of the holiday, comparing and contrasting this day with all those yesterdays, remembering as much about those earlier holidays as possible, and see how the connections of feelings, thoughts and experiences reveal themselves to you. Connect your present to your past, fill in the blanks, and through the process you will come to understand and enjoy your life more fully.
When we talk about our days as a series of vignettes gathered into a group that create the whole, we begin to also see the weeks, months and years, and our lives, as woven together into a cohesive pattern, rather than time that has slipped through our hands like so much sand on a beach. We often wonder where time goes. In journaling your daily experiences you can see it all laid out before you with as much detail as you choose to embody it. Take a few moments and jot down everything you did yesterday. My guess is that you will discover some surprises in how you use your time, and in how you view the way you use your time. What have you automatically deleted from the list before your pen touched the page? How do you feel about your accomplishments? What would you like to exchange out as a "do over" for next time? How honest have you been with yourself about the events that are now part of your personal history?
Beyond getting you in the groove of recognizing how you manage your time and personal resources, journaling your daily life is effective in showing you parts of your life, in your own words, parts of your life of which you may not even be aware. Things like behavior patterns, personal preferences, relational triggers, what you avoid and what you embrace, are all issues that can arise and be tracked when you regularly journal your experiences. Thinking about your job after you leave work is almost inevitable, especially if you are unhappy with your circumstances or irritated with your co-workers. Sometimes the people we live with, love them though we do, are annoying, cranky and intrusive. Or, perhaps, it's all in our perception. When you write out these scenarios of the thorns that are perpetually in your side, you either begin to get really sick of hearing yourself repeat the same theme over and over, or you begin to recognize the patterns creating your responses, and you see how you can make different choices to create the reality you want. Journaling draws us to consciousness, which leads us to making our lives better places, if we want them to be.
The practice of growing familiar with regular journaling will serve you well in many ways. Vacations, special dinners, historical sites, and personal adventures, can be recalled and relived when written about as part of your daily life, or as individual vignettes to be cherished on their own. Journaling the experiences and events of your life is a tangible way to remember how well you have lived, and how well-lived you plan your present and future to be. Journaling affirms for each of us that we can only live our own life, so we may as well have a good, conscious time doing it.
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Journaling Memories
God gave us memories that we may have roses in December. Although these are not my own words, but a quote from a source long forgotten, I have returned to them frequently for their truth and beauty. Roses being one of my favorite flowers, It is an easy bridge from the image of the red blossoms that pose for a few weeks each summer in my back yard to my Auntie Viola, who taught me to love them as she did. While Auntie Viola passed on years ago, and my roses are settled into their out-of-season repose, the idea that our memories are gardens reflecting the rich detail of our lives and its accessibility to us, means we can revisit our experiences, thoughts and feelings amy time we want, and enjoy again the tangibility of relationships and events from earlier times. Happy memories rekindle warmth, tenderness and delight. Tougher situations recalled give logic and perspective to feelings that, at the time we lived them, overwhelmed or frightened us. Memories are important parts of our lives. Working back through dimly lit hallways from our childhood, high school or college years teaches us not only where we have been, but also how our choices have shaped our lives. Redirecting our memories to challenge us to grow into who we want to become is also the gift of recognizing how we may choose to view past experiences and life in the present moment.
Retracing memories is perhaps one of the most useful tools to reveal our lives to us in new ways, and to assist us in integrating our experiences as lasting, positive parts of our lives. Journaling this process is particularly useful for several reasons. Just as a written historical record of an event creates a touchstone to which we can return for reassurance, hope or confirmation, so does a journaled account of a memory. What was your first day of school like? What ever became of the presents and the guests from your thirteenth birthday party? Where were you, and what were you doing, when we crossed over into the new millennium? What did you like best about your vacation last year? What is your first memory of your grandparents? All of these are roses blooming in your memory, ready to be savored. If you have no idea where to begin, the idea itself can become your toehold. Almost like an object lesson, favorite items related to the memory can also jostle our minds, relinquishing long-buried facts and feelings that can be jotted down, pondered and reassembled into an orderly, cohesive format. Report cards, art projects, favorite articles of clothing, and photographs, can help nudge your psyche to assist you in retrieving almost any memory you would like to reconnect with, and have at hand whenever the mood suits you.
Being able to return to our memories allows us to remind ourselves of where we were, where we are now, and where we would like to direct ourselves in the future. Rather than playing tricks on us in the midst of stressful or anxious times, our memories can serve us, become our allies, our comforters and our guides. Remembering and writing down how you lived through a challenging experience, such as losing a job or facing an undesirable move to another part of the country, gives you a foothold if a similar situation ever comes up again. Cherishing the moment of grace as your first love enters your life is a great blessing. Remembering it each time you come back to it in your journal makes that experience a blessing for all time. Reminding yourself of the sweetness of a summer's night in the middle of winter means you can still hold onto the rhythm of life in the seasons themselves. Rather than feeling stuck in our memories, unable to release them to move forward in our lives, journaling our memories allows us to place them in perspective, integrate them into our lives, and use them as tools to continue to create and develop our futures.
To that end, memories are also great mysteries that evolve over time as they overlap in our hearts and souls, and fill in the gaps in our consciousness that we have left behind. It is fascinating to me that our whole lives are literally stored in our heads. Granted, there are a few pieces of information flitting around in each of us that is better left untouched and silent. But most of this compact filing system, and how we've organized it for ourselves, is quite a miracle. The more we know of our memories, the more we can unravel the great mystery that is our own in which to delight. It is a tremendous gift to know oneself fully. From that point of reference can be launched many good choices, from career to life partner. Nobody else can do that for us, or should. Journaling your memories puts your life work in your own hands, and allows you to shape your future with consciousness and wholeness.
Finally, what is wonderful about journaling memories is that you can start wherever you like, and continue in any direction you choose. It is your life, your garden and your roses. Equally wonderful is the garden you can create in your heart and soul, a garden you can visit any time, any season, whenever you choose to open your journal and remember.
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Journaling Demystified
Have you been considering journaling, but have questions about how to get started? Journaling is a wonderful way to explore your faith through prayer, reflection and personal narrative. Shared here are some of the popular questions about journaling, and the opportunity to formulate your own answers to see if journaling fits for you and your journey.
Why do people journal?
Journaling is a simple process of putting writing instrument to paper to express a thought, an idea, a belief, as it relates to your own life. Journaling can also be about creating order in one's mind, clearing out the cobwebs of a stressful time, assigning categories for life experiences worked through and shelved away from a time long past. Journaling creates a process by which we can integrate our faith with our life process, and include God in the dialogue. People journal for all kinds of reasons, including all of the above, as well as to mark an occasion they hope never to forget, a vacation of a lifetime and a lifetime well-lived. Individuals journal to connect with their souls, to enrich their conscious experience and to document the details which can slip away so easily. Mostly, people journal because they want to, and they love to.
Who journals?
Anybody who wants to journal and makes the time to do so can. Author Virginia Woolf, women journeying to settle the West in the nineteenth century, Mary Chestnut, Civil War-era Southern woman, war veterans from Revolutionary times to the present, and Anne frank, teenager killed in a World War II German concentration camp, all wrote journals which survived their writers to tell of their lives. Most of us have no intention of publishing what we write, in this lifetime or the next, so this is not a point of perfectionism or a belief that journaling is only for those who consider themselves good writers. Journaling is for anybody who wants to write, feels compelled to write, especially if only for themselves. As people in our culture become more comfortable with expressing their feelings, journaling has increased in popularity. Today you will discover journaling crossing gender and generational lines, as well as being a self-discovery /cheap therapy for many people to work through personal issues, family crisis and as part of the process of grieving. Frequently used situationally, journaling is also a life-path sounding board for those who consider doing journaling as important as their morning coffee.
What do people use to journal?
Partly, those who don't journal want to know what to write about, but they are also asking what can possible be so important as to spend money on bound books of blank pages and fancy expensive pens with your name engraved on them. What you write about are considered personal tools, while what you write with are considered practical tools. Personal tools are abundant because they are what life is made of: thoughts, feelings, ideas, experiences, everyday issues, world events, community situations, faith issues and relationships among all of these, are personal tools with which to establish, nurture and continue your journaling process. If you are happy using the cheapest pens and paper you can find, have at it. If you like pretty, bound books, fountain pens and colored markers to create companion illustrations, you will have a great time journaling too. I personally have one foot in both camps. I use bound, unlined books purchased en masse at clearance sales, and any pen that feels good moving across the paper. I am, however, not opposed to leather bound books and elegant pens if I have the financial resources and the luck to find them.
How do people journal?
Unless you already journal regularly, it is difficult to imagine squeezing one more task into your day, especially one that can feel quite daunting in its newness. Journaling is a habit like any other activity you do on a regular basis. And, like any other addition to our lives, we make the time if we are serious about wanting to do it. Frequency, length of your journaling sessions and the amount of pages you would like to journal are all up to you. Each writer is on her/his own path, and has the luxurious responsibility of choosing these ways of framing their journaling experience to create the results they want.
When do people journal?
Whenever they can. There is no right time of day to journal, although there are times that are better for you than others, perhaps different times on different days. What i believe is most important is to commit to the journaling itself, then map out when you will journal, so you don't pretend with yourself that you will get to it when time comes available. It doesn't, and you and I both know that. Be honest with yourself, look at your schedule and figure out the ways you can carve out time for yourself to do this. Maybe you are a morning person and you would do well getting up thirty minutes earlier to write a few days a week. Or perhaps your children nap at a fairly regular time and you would enjoy that as some adult time for yourself. Perhaps in the evening, when your home is settled in, is a peaceful, reflective time that suits you. Journals can also be brought on vacation to record your experiences, special events and these events as they relate to your everyday life.
Where do people journal?
Most people who ask this question cannot conceive of making space in their lives, let alone space in their homes, to create a journaling experience. Sometimes knowing the writing location helps ground a journaler, connects her/him to the place and the process. The three guiding principles here are privacy, intention and comfort. You may have plenty of desks and tables in your home, but you will need to scope out which spaces provide you with quiet and no interruptions. Choosing that spot and making it your own, perhaps with a storage space for your practical tools, will help you keep connected to this new adventure in your life. Making the space, comfortable, even if it is in a corner of the least used room in the house, with a simple chair, table, a seat cushion and a pretty candle, can give you a great boost to creating this experience for yourself. It can also be fun to take your journal to a favorite coffee shop or park to change your surroundings and to stimulate your senses.
The great gift of journaling is two fold. In creating a journaling life for yourself, you sow the abundance of life and reap its benefits for yourself ten times over. A conscious life, well-lived, is also a blessing of immeasurable worth to those around you. You simply cannot lose when you give yourself the gift of journaling.
