There’s nothing like a journal to help a person see just who he or she really is. Many famous people kept journals. Thomas Jefferson, Charles Darwin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Winston Churchill walked around with notebooks to record their every day thoughts. Susan Sontag is said to write things in her journal that she could not say to people’s faces. These famous people were busy recording things that were meaningful to them.
Journals vs Diaries:
A journal is not quite like a diary. Diaries are bound to dates. The concept of a diary comes from the concept of datebook. The first definition of “journal” is a newspaper, a gazette, works containing recordings (of course, quite often what are labeled “diaries” are really “journals). Many people are repelled by the idea of a diary–writing down the trivial events of their days. They can be attracted to the idea of dissecting and untangling the incredibly complex things that pass through their minds every day.
People write journals, speaking to a personal future, some even in the hope that some future sympathetic soul will read what they have written to discover some hidden value in it, that they themselves could not see, or weren’t permitted to see, in their own time. You could put it as one blogger did,
“What a journal allows you to do is to have a ‘vehicle for my sense of selfhood.’”
Journals and Growth:
A journal is a safe-haven that can soothe you, sadden you, motivate you, allow you to reflect and make you love yourself for who you really are. Most people realize that daily life in a complex, competitive, driven, social environment sometimes buries them, drives them further and further from who they are deep down. A journal is a constant, always there for you, stabilized by the continuity of your experience and your memory.
Turning Thoughts into Written Words:
Writing your thoughts is a way of amplifying them and forcing them into an intelligible form. It is something like talking to yourself when the mental environment is too noisy. Writing is a challenge because the logical format as you see words spread on paper is not as jumbled as the way ideas and impressions flow through your mind. Writing improves memory by purifying the stream of ideas. That was one of the reasons writing came into existence, to meet an important human capacity. Writing makes ideas sharable, even if you don’t share them.
When you put things on paper you have to order them, clarify them, and solidify what you are thinking. As novelist, Virginia Wolf observed in one of her journal entries, when she re-read her old volumes, she found the significance of things to lie in places where she never saw it before. In his analysis of dreams, Freud found that the mind compresses symbols together, so that one image can signify a complex and multi-leveled story.
Journaling, Introspection, and Meditation:
Meditation and journal writing are both time-out practices. The surface of our lives is in constant motion and we are driven, sometimes uncomfortably by the rapid and continuous flow–the buzzing confusion (as Henry James called it). Writing requires that you sit separate from the flow of life and thought so you can view it in safety. It is a chance to document our practices, to reflect on meanings, to release longings and questions. Sometimes journaling takes the form of drawing or even music, depending on how your emotions emerge.
The combination of meditation and journaling is a natural fit. These practices represent a practical use of introspection. When you look deeply enough, you find how valuable, subtle and beautiful your complex, layered world of sensation, memory and thought really are.