You don’t know what you think.
Most of us wander around like sugar-crazed toddlers with a million barely-coherent thoughts inside our minds. And we don’t even know they are there.
Oh sure, we may be aware of vague sense of unease. But we cannot articulate it. Or we may have a sense of longing, as of something barely-recognized voice, beckoning us from the dim future. “Come this way!”
But again, the thought remains unarticulated and unrecognized.
Journaling shines a light into those dark places. It articulates and clarifies that yearning you feel in your soul.
Journaling – with pen, on paper – reveals what’s going on inside your own mind.
A story for you.
As I sat down to journal today, pen in hand, my phone went “ding.” There, in my Twitter timeline, a story and photo from a friend.
He grew up in Minneapolis. A highway ran east to west through town. It went all the way to the Pacific Ocean. (This was before they built the interstate.)
As a child, he dreamed of driving that highway as far as it went, to its terminus, all the way to the ocean. But – as with most childhood dreams – it faded with the years.
Now in his late 50s, he remembered that long-forgotten dream. And so, he flew to Minneapolis, rented a car, and set out for parts unknown. All the way to the Pacific Ocean.
There, at the literal end of the road, he found an old abandoned warehouse. The roof rotted. The paint faded. The painted words at the top of the wall fading away. Weeds littered the grounds and pushed through the foundation.
He snapped that photo there at the end of the road.
In the image I see now on my phone, a deep, blue sky contrasts with faded, muted colors of the old warehouse. The past and the present mashed together in an image subtle with power and deceptive beauty.
I start writing. And as I write, I think about the role of Beauty in our lives. In fact, I realize now that I’ve been thinking about Beauty for weeks without being fully conscious of it. If I wasn’t journaling, I would have missed what my subconscious is telling me in this moment.
As it has done for more than 40 years now, journaling reveals my own thoughts to me. Sometimes, my thoughts are pretty cool.
Don’t cheat, no computers. Use a nice pen on real paper. You can thank me later.