My Interest in Journaling

I have been fascinated (perhaps obsessed!) with journaling since I can remember – at least since the age of 4. Currently I add, nearly daily, to a computer-based journaling system of my own design. I taught myself to program in part so that I could create this family of tools and software experiences. It contains over 29 thousand entries. I being with these facts so that I can say that I am serious about it. It a major, maybe THE major, Golden Thread that weaves together the various currents of my life.

I began using the term “journaling” in high school, but I have always felt that the term is not quite right, not quite big enough and maybe even a little boring. What I really mean is something like this: The family of ways that I use to observe, collect, explore and create with, the events of my life, both external and internal. For now, when I make myself give a term to the process, I call it Journaling.

I have worked with other people to use journaling systems and methods that I and others have created. These have included everything from fellow students who want to keep track of notes, fellow speakers who want to weave scholarship into “talks,” people who have experienced catastrophic memory loss, people who want to capture ideas for innovation, people who want keep track of their babies early days and their families vacations. All of these experiences have permanently convinced me one thing: While there are many excellent best practices, starting points, techniques, habits, motivations, systems and methodologies, I have become deeply convinced that the approach one takes to journaling should be fluid, changing, evolving, opportunistic, practical and unique. The process is so intimate, so individual and so potentially affirming of individual difference, interest, creativity, subjective realities and pre-processed, pre-conscious material, make-up of personality and individual experience - that everyone can and should develop their own dynamic families of “ways to journal.”

Those of us who are interested in the process itself may point in the right direction, provide tools, motivation and example. In the end, however, while the best journaling experiences may begin and refresh themselves there – they do not end there.

So let me offer my personal interests, and some of what has motivated them, largely just for fun. If you get a spark of interest or a useful idea from them, I’m happy. As you read though, stay aware, that no matter how excited I am about a particular part of it - in the end it comes down to what works for you right now, and how you will change and evolve what works for you to keep it working for you!