. . . The weekly virtual “gratitude jar.”
This week, I’m expressing thanks for my habit of keeping a journal.
Decades before I started this blog, in which I mostly share happy things (because I need to do it to keep myself out of the Slough of Despond), I started keeping actual handwritten journals. Bound books, in which I’m unfettered by propriety. I can write anything, draw pictures and cartoons (well, my pictures are all pretty much cartoons), and glue in anything that fits.
It’s a record of my life and my mentality. I keep notes. I can tell you with accuracy what I was doing and thinking the afternoon of June 25, 1989. A summer that changed my life. What my attitude was. If I only took photographs, it would be harder to revisit the moment, the mood, the magic. Or whatever. It’s probably a good thing I didn’t take photographs, because it forced me to take notes. Everyone around me seemed to have a camera, so why should I need one? I provide the background story to everyone’s snapshots.
And writing, I’m able to put it down, let it go, whatever “it” is. A frustration, a joy, a moment of magic. The pleasures can be immortalized, remembered. The angers, injustices are frozen in stasis, finished, banished into history.
And someday, my journals will turn up in a stuffy flea market, and some lucky buyer will have a helluva hoot reading them. (I know I’d buy someone’s journal collection if I found it at a secondhand store!)
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