Journaling

First of all, to all my readers, I wish you have an amazing New Year, filled with prosperity, growth and development.

Today, we delve in to the world of journaling. We will try to decipher whether this concept is a requirement, or just a rich person nuance which can only add value if you have no other problems in the world.

“All the noise in my brain. I clamp it to the page so it will be still.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

Let’s face it, there are more problems in the world today than have ever existed in the human race’s existence. Granted, the problems are not pertaining to how we ensure survival, but we for sure have problems to solve. These problems can be of any nature imaginable; professional, personal, familial, social, financial, you name it.

However, the digital age has enabled us to be closer to tools and ideas to circumvent most problems we can imagine. I am sure that there are solutions to problems that we don’t even know exist, and the solutions are fetching mighty financial gains to someone somewhere who had the right know how at the right time.

So many problems, and so many solutions have led to an inadvertent degree of complexity that has been introduced in our lives. The complexity is when a problem can be solved in more than one ways, which is possible in the case of almost all problems.

Which tool, which solution will help us get us out of the trouble we are facing? How do we know what works for us? For answering this question, there has to be an understanding of ourselves. Now how do we understand ourselves better? That is an age old question, and one that we have flirted with for the past few articles.

Like other problems, there can be a number of ways this question can be answered. However, as a reoccurring theme, the solution to this problem boils down to introspection. Our ability to draw from within insights about ourselves is what introspection leads us to.

So, essentially, solving the problem of understanding yourself would help you choose the right tool for you to solve your problem, and the tool would then help you solve your problem. I have always been a fan of simplicity in life, and I tend to fall back on tried and tested mechanisms for solving problems, new or old.

This brings us to the subject matter at hand today, which is journaling. Journaling as a concept has found a number of ways to introduce itself, but hardly any of these throws positive light at it.

My introduction to journaling was through an English lesson on “diary entry” in school. The lesson was structured by talking about the right “construct” of writing a diary entry. Given it was a school assigned activity, I wasn’t able to make it a regular activity in life at the time.

My second encounter with journaling was through the channel that teaches us the most (this is sarcasm, please don’t consider this my honest opinion), pop culture.

I saw teenage girls taking to their diary’s/slam books/scrap books etc. to confess their undying love (again, sarcasm) for their high-school sweethearts and then again to highlight how big of pricks they were when they inevitably chose someone more popular than them in their movies.

First school, then pop culture; there wasn’t really a chance for me to actually pick up journaling. That was only up until I discovered stoicism, and I realised journaling isn’t meant for us to pour our hearts out. Journaling is meant to keep a record of our experiences, so that we can learn from them and not repeat our past mistakes.

Marcus Aurelius, the ancient Roman emperor, the most powerful man on Earth at a time, took to his journal daily for years on end to give us “Meditations”, the manual on stoicism and leading a virtuous life. There isn’t one mention of how he was so emotional or how someone did him wrong.

Whenever we talk about feelings, I feel it is a grossly misunderstood subject. Nowadays, feelings equate to what we feel in the moment. “Go with your gut” and “you shouldn’t apologise for how you feel” are maxims that are thrown around with relative comfort, without really understanding their underlying principles.

Feelings aren’t supposed to govern our actions, they are supposed to be an inventory for us to go back to and get a better understanding of ourselves. Journaling helps us to do exactly that.

Journaling helps us have a clear record of how we felt when something happened, what we did in response, & whether it was warranted.

It is less feeling and more inventory.

So, if you would like to pick a positive habit for your New Year’s resolution, I would highly recommend journaling.

If you stuck around this far, thank you for your time. If you enjoyed this, share this with one friend of yours whom you think will benefit from reading this. Thanks for reading, and I will see you in the next one. 🙂