Journaling isn’t about keeping a diary, at least that’s not the impression I want to give you. If you’re a teenager, writing out your secret thoughts and dreams is almost a right of passage, a pun would be ‘a write of passage’. But you’re not a teenager. You’ve lived for more than a few decades and in that time you’ve had our own hopes and dreams but you’ve also had your share of experiences. It’s those experiences that I’m talking about when I use the word ‘journaling’.
If you did keep a diary, you can use it to refresh your memory. School dances, birthday parties, special occasions, festivals, trips, vacations…the list is endless. The events don’t have to be odd or special in any way. I wasn’t in Vancouver before WWII but I’d sure like to know what the stores, streets and schools were like back then. If you were in Japan, for instance, what was popular? What radio shows entertained your family?
Your past was linear but your reflections don’t have to be. Starting high school and graduating took several years but what were the differences between those two periods? Did the curriculum change? If you worked for the same company, what were the final days like compared to when you started?
When I was very young, I lived on a farm about 3 km outside of a small village. While we did have a telephone, as a matter of fact my mother was an operator at that company for a while, we weren’t alone. Our ‘party’ line had 27 other families on it. One line, 27 houses. If you wanted to make a call, you had to pick up the phone, wait for the operator to say “number please” and then they would connect you. By the time I moved out, we had a single line, maybe with touchtone. The telephone company was bought out by Bell Canada. There’s a memory I have about telephones as an example of what you could write about in your journal.
I’ll leave you with a name and a link to Wikipedia. Samuel Pepys was a diarist, a very special one. Was he famous in his time? Not at all. The reason we remember him is because of his diary. That diary spanned ten years. He wrote about a million words about his daily life in the 17th century. His record of everyday experiences is a superb historical document, very likely one of a kind. They are his words, written at that time, nothing like you’d find in a history book written a century later by someone who wasn’t even alive then. The point here is that your life and experiences are important, maybe not so much right now but in a hundred years, future generations of your family and friends will be able to relive some of what you did. Keep that in mind, folks.
Here’s the link to the Wiki: Samuel Pepys Life and Diary
Thanks for reading. Feel free to comment below and let me know what you think.
Cheers!
Brian Mahoney
December 18, 2024