Rusted Bicycle

Three Day Weekend Three Pack

1. Haircut. 
2. New car. 
3. Movie with my wife in a theater.

Every Single Day

Back in the Day

I have kept journals for years. There is a box full of notebooks at home as evidence. They are a motley crew, these journals: sticker-covered spiral notebooks, faux leather books, and a number of black hipster notebooks with a likely fictitious pedigree. These tomes date back some twenty years, the oldest from my sophomore or junior year in high school.

These notebooks are almost completely full of crap. They are also some of my most prized possessions. I would grab this box if the house were on fire.

Over the years, I have gone through periods of disinterest, times when I felt the burden of writing in these books was not worth the time each day. I’ve felt like an angsty teenager writing bad poetry or a twelve year old wishing for a pony. So I put the book away.

But I always come back. Weeks or months later, I find myself browsing notebooks at the book store. My day feels incomplete without the few minutes of reflection provided by my journal. After twenty years, the habit has become part of me. I can understand this. I can even enjoy it. But I wanted to understand the process more to figure out how I can control it to get some real benefits.

Why Keep a Journal

I always felt a little odd about keeping a journal. I got a lot of pleasure and therapy out of these books, but wondered if others found it odd, if everyone though I was just like a twelve year old wishing for that pony. At times when I grew tired of the practice, I thought about how so many people simply did not do this. Was I missing out on something, skipping some adult behavior by keeping my journal?

In retrospect, I think the real issue was worrying about what others thought.

There was a post on the Art of Manliness blog over the summer discussing a grandfather’s practice of keeping a journal and how it ultimately paid off:

My grandpa, Bill Hurst, was a journal writer his entire life. His journal was quite simple. He just kept a small notebook in the pocket of his pearl snap shirts and jotted down a short description of the things he did and the people he did it with. This is something he did pretty much every day for his entire life. He also kept extensive diaries of his time as a forest ranger in the Wasatch Range.

And later:

As each year passes, the pixels of our memories burn out and the haze sets in. By age 80, you’ll only remember the faintest outlines of the big things that happened to you. But the stuff that’s really interesting is often the little, seemingly mundane details of life. What was a man’s daily routine like in 2009? Of course, the whipper snappers will ask you about the big stuff too: “Where were you when you found out about the attacks on the World Trade Center?” and “What did you think about the election of Barack Obama?” Your journals will give them the answers they’ll be looking for and will bring you closer.

Memories of events are one thing, but persistence of ideas is another. Steven Johnson’s post on the historical practice of the Commonplace Book talk about how people have used notebooks to record thoughts an ideas over a lifetime of study. Ideas can grow in one’s mind for years. Notes you take while reading a book over the weekend might call back to a thought from ten years ago. But these types of connections are only possible if you write everything down and can get back to it later.

Breaking Old Habits

Over the summer, I volunteered to help out with a pro bono project at work. I initially saw it as a chance for me to step out of my role and contribute a little more. When I found out with details of the work, was even more enthusiastic–we were helping out some local entrepreneurs market their business idea. And the business idea in question was one I had done some considerable thinking about a few years earlier. I had written all this thinking down in my journal.

I rushed home from work and tore into the box. I could not find the right section.

Another time, many years prior, I was having a conversation with someone at work and could not recall the word “Objectivism”. I remembered writing it in my journal as I captured some notes about a book I was reading. I remembered which side of the fold (right) I had written the word. I remembered the area of the page where I had written the word (top third). I could visualize nearly everything about the word except the word itself.

I ended up looking like more of an idiot than the typical guy reading a lot of Ayn Rand.

In either of these cases, a full text search would have saved my ass.

For years, I told myself I could only write on paper. That my mind would only really work, wander correctly, slip into create mode if I were moving a pen. Typing was what I did every day and the act of clicking on a keyboard slipped my mind into analytic work mode.

This turned out to be complete bullshit. The older I get, the more things I thought were true turn out to be complete bullshit. This is liberating and terrifying.

I had tried to move to keeping an electronic journal before and had been burned by technology glitches. I also have the tendency to spend time tweaking the “system”. But there was also sentimental resistance. I have always had the idea that someone might find all these journals in the future, that my son or grandson might poor through the notebooks in a dusty attic in the future. Frankly, it’s had to imagine anyone perusing text files with the same interest as they would handwritten notebooks.

These barriers were built around everything except the actual writing.

Flash forward to 2011 and technology has improved. I can create a text file and get to it from any computer or my phone without fear of file corruption and loss–and without maintenance or system-tweaking. So I tried an experiment: Not only would I move from notebooks to electronic, I would move from what I had been doing for years to daily pages. I would target 750 words each day, ideally first thing in the morning. Just a brain dump. Maybe it would be crap. It probably would be crap. But the important thing was to just keep my fingers tapping, to just keep writing. It was an act reminiscent of something I read in a Natalie Goldberg book very long ago.

I also reminded me of a quote from Cory Doctorow:

Write every day. Anything you do every day gets easier. If you’re insanely busy, make the amount that you write every day small (100 words? 250 words?) but do it every day.

And it worked. It is still working. I felt my mind break free of the excuses I had created, the bullshit arguments about not being able to write with a keyboard. Also, I don’t feel myself falling into the ruts that made me grow tired of journal keeping in the past. I look forward to typing thee words each day. A lot of it is total crap. Most of it is total crap. There is also the fair amount of complaining that goes on in everyone’s journals. But there are good pieces. A word here, an idea there. A thread may develop as I toss something around in my head over a week. Thoughts have room to move, breath, grow.

Still Learning About Myself After All These Years

Keeping a journal is important to me. Not only had I forgotten why the practice is important to me, I had not adapted my behavior at all in twenty years. I am not the same person I was at seventeen and have very different goals and needs from keeping such a personal record. It is no wonder I felt myself slipping into ruts and growing tired of the practice.

But the cool thing is that I can go back to these old volumes and see exactly how I have changed over the years. I know what mistakes I have made, what lies I have told myself, what promises I have broken. But I also know how I’ve learned from my past, how I have become better. Because, like writing, life is practice.

I’m thirty-six years old and still learning about myself. And what more reason do I need than that?