Journal On

I started my first diary in 2nd grade. It was a little navy thing probably from the Chapman Highway Kroger with one page per date. I thought it was the most magical concept ever, that this blank page wanted to hear about my day. Ever since, I've obeyed this compulsion to record my life. In writing. In sound. In photos (lots). Videos. I think my greatest swathes of concentration have gone into these acts. I've come to understand them, and journaling in particular, as an act of autotherapy, a.k.a. po' folk therapy, a way of giving to myself my own face.

Nonetheless, since my journal entries have generally leaned more towards reporting the day's events rather than anything to be considered literary or profound (or even worse, though most entertaining, the ones where I did try to be profound!) I came to harbor a lingering doubt as to whether it was a worthy use of time. But these quotes I've come across lately assure me that documenting the day in any form is a wholly worthwhile and precious endeavor.

You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done . . . you are fierce with reality. --Florida Scott Maxwell, from The Measure of My Days, quoted in Let Your Life Speak by Parker Palmer, p. 70

The pessimist resembles a man who observes with fear and sadness that his wall calendar, from which he daily tears a sheet, grows thinner with each passing day. On the other hand, the person who attacks the problems of life actively is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors, after first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back. He can reflect with pride and joy on all the richness set down in these notes, on all the life he has already lived to the fullest. --Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, p. 144

Here's one which speaks to that grief which comes to me when I can't possibly record all that which I want to remember:

I never tire of saying that the only really transitory aspects of life are the potentialities; but as soon as they are actualized, they are rendered realities at that very moment; they are saved and delivered into the past, wherin they are rescued and preserved from transitoriness. For in the past, nothing is irretrievably lost but everything irrevocably stored. . . . Usually, to be sure, man considers only the stubblefield of transitoriness and overlooks the full granaries of the past, wherein he had salvaged once and for all his deeds, his joys, and also his sufferings. Nothing can be undone, and nothing can be done away with. I should say having been is the surest kind of being. --Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, p. 143

And more from Parker Palmer:

We capitalists have a long and crippling legacy of believing in the power of external realities much more deeply than we believe in the power of the inner life. . . . it is so much easier to deal with the external world, to spend our lives manipulating material and institutions and other people instead of dealing with our own souls. --Let Your Life Speak, pp. 77, 82

Palmer goes on to plead the case for doing "inner work", that is "skills like journaling, reflective reading, spiritual friendship, meditation, and prayer," (p. 91) insisting that if we skimp on our inner work, our outer work will suffer as well.