New journal documents my exciting life!
I recently started keeping a journal, thinking it would be a good exercise in slowing down and reflecting on my daily life. My first entry, on Feb. 4, said, “Found a dead spider in the bathroom sink.”
This thing is gonna be wild.
I once read the diary of a pioneer woman in the 19th century, and I found myself engrossed with her observations about the weather and the price of calico. Hers was in some ways a quieter time, without social media to allow her to live vicariously through more interesting people.
But she did have the constant looming threats of disease, starvation, natural disasters and freak accidents. So in between entries about husking corn and whitewashing anything that stood still, this woman would write things like “Mr. Johnson’s best horse fell into a well” or “Locusts carried the baby off,” often with no further explanation. I love how that limited information allowed my imagination to fill in the picture of this woman’s life.
I also own an old journal I bought at an antique store years ago. It dates to around 1912 and was written by a teenage girl in upstate New York. While she mostly wrote about school, in the winter she and a group of boys and girls would go ice skating until dark and then all go back to one friend’s house for hot cocoa.
After one of those evenings, she wrote, “Jack and I sat in the big chair!!!!!” I’ll never know exactly what went on that night, but it was the first time I ever found myself reading between the exclamation points. Who needs emojis when you can say so much with punctuation?
For me, I chose a five-year “comparative” journal. Each page has space for five entries, all with the same date but for different years. So when next Feb. 4 comes around, I’ll be able look at the entry above it and, at a minimum, observe a moment of silence for the dead spider.
I also chose a one-line-a-day format designed to keep my entries short. I’ve had a garden journal for years, and though I bought it for keeping track of things like what I plant and when, I tend to ramble.
My concise crop notes soon give way to stream-of-consciousness essays on everything from mosquitoes to sandals to plantar fasciitis, until I’ve gone on for multiple pages reviewing movies I once saw that included, at best, passing references to gardens (or plantar fasciitis). It’s too much.
“My first entries looked like the frenzied scribbles of a lie detector machine reacting to a real whopper.”
This one-line version, in contrast, gives me only enough space to record a single thought each day. Yesterday, that meant choosing what most stood out for me: that I found a desiccated pomegranate in the crisper drawer (I bought a pomegranate?) or that someone ran over a squirrel in front of our house.
This is the kind of introspection journaling demands. I love it.
I have to work on my penmanship, though. My first entries looked like the frenzied scribbles of a lie detector machine reacting to a real whopper.
I try to remind myself that if I hastily scrawl the words “Made an oil change appointment,” I’m going to come back to the same page in later years and wonder what I meant by “Mote an old chimichanga apartment.” I can’t let the most momentous events of my life be lost to bad penmanship.
Legibility aside, the journal is already changing my perspective. In the past, for instance, I would have said that February is the most boring month of the year. But now that I’m keeping track, I see I was wrong.
In just the last week, I have both bought deodorant and changed the batteries in the remote. Even in the dead of winter, it turns out, my life is a whirlwind.
Somehow, daily journaling makes me feel connected across time to that 19th-century pioneer woman. Sure, I have electricity and modern medicine and voting rights and online banking, while she had the occasional plague of locusts.
But I hope that in 150 years, just as I did with her journal, someone will read mine and use my brief but consistent entries over several years to build a picture of me as a whole person.
I don’t think they’ll be disappointed. If you think my first couple weeks of journal entries sound thrilling, wait till I start using exclamations points.
