Perhaps you are out there somewhere, but among my acquaintances, I can count on one hand the people who are simultaneously journal-keepers and male. Every now and then when The Wags stand around the barbecue pit on Father’s day, I like to imagine everybody sitting down with a tablet, pen, and cup of Earl Grey to get in touch with their more delicate sensibilities. End of joke.
That is the end of the joke because I’m serious. I’ve been reticent about about journaling because it seemed effete, if not downright risky to masculinity. But I’ve recovered.
There’s a quote out there attributed to various authors, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” Indeed. I continue to be surprised at the vanities that appear under my pen; arguments full of holes and flawed logic, grotesque over-simplifications of complex issues. I am often forced to believe about myself what I see in print and it is awful.
Dr. Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren, in How to Read a Book, say that “The man who cannot say what he thinks often does not know what he thinks.” Allow me to mirror this into a positive statement: When we can say what we think, we do know what we think. Journaling can help us with this.
But more than merely exposing faulty thinking, it can also help us patch it up. Remember the factoid about phone numbers containing seven numbers because this is the limit of short-term memory? Whenever the thing-to-remember exceeds the limits, we grope for a memory aid, such as a pen and paper, to free our short term memory from the cognitive load.
This also works with ideas, feelings, or problems. Set it down on paper, get it off the mind. Now that you have freed brain space, you are able to spend energy on the finer points of the argument, or to hold the entire thing at arm’s length and check it for cracks. Or perhaps, once you have certain grudge out in the daylight, you see it was so ridiculous that you just need to let it go. How do I know what I think until I see what I say?
Reading and writing is also crafty, if not witchy. Imagine this scene: Missionaries penetrate the Amazon to an indigenous tribe who have never seen paper or writing before. One missionary takes out a piece of paper, scribbles a note asking for a drink of water and sends it to the other missionary by the hand of a native. The second missionary reads the note and sends a cup of water back with the native. The native thinks it is witchcraft. How can a piece of pulpwood with marks on it make for such precise communication?
I feel like that native when I read or write, and I have never recovered from the magic. When I’m writing, I feel like a magician, making meaning out of thin air, order out of chaos. When I’m reading, I’m watching someone pull a rabbit from a hat, with the only difference being I do not feel duped. Two people of different races, different places, different status, or completely different time can communicate. You can become a grandpa who raises an awareness of your existence, you may leave letters to addressed to the next generation via a journal.
It’s also possible to live out our days in some blend of work and church, only to awake on our birthdays and New Year and be surprised at how we are not better humans. Journaling, for myself, has been one of the most incisive self-evaluation tools, a thought graph on which to chart personal growth or decline. We have a direct reading on the person we used to be. We are also reminded of the person we planned to be but are not yet.
When I re-read my journals now, two of my main reactions are laughter and a kind of sympathy. Laughter is a necessary for this kind of retrospection, and if you do not have the ability to laugh at yourself then do not journal. It will damage your psyche, not to mention your self-image. Sympathy, the other reaction, is the process of recognizing imperfection in yourself and accepting it.
Perhaps your former self repulses you. Fine. Hide the journal, lock it up, burn it, or change your life so you are no longer embarrassed by what you must write. Those are you options. Burned journals may have been the most useful of all, because if we do not feel superior to our younger selves it may be that we have not grown.
The trouble with journaling is that it takes energy and discipline, but I like to think of it as building a habit of reflection. James Clear, in his famous book Atomic Habits (a bible for hacking your brain), says that to start a journaling habit, pair it with something fun or comfortable (nice stationary, cup of coffee, etc.).
Another way is to limit how much you allow yourself to write. Sound counterintuitive? Write one sentence per day, or write for two minutes per day. No more. After six months of one-liners, you might have a publishable book of aphorisms. Or not, as the case may be. Soon, you will see that writing for three minutes isn’t that hard. Or writing three sentences. But the important thing is you now have a habit and can build upwards from that foundation.
And neither does it take much time, if you were opening your mouth to use that argument.
For myself, good stationery is a must, just like a good pen or pencil, and I freely admit that this is a psychological trick to get myself to care. It would have been much more difficult for me to develop a journaling habit with ugly stationery or lousy writing instruments. Or perhaps you dislike handwriting. There are electronic options. Personally, electronic journals feel insubstantial and ephemeral, and they don’t occupy shelf space like a hardbound journal. But it might work for you.
Just because I play with words does not mean that I think the rest of the world should become writers. Rather, I wish the action of scribbling might extend to you the same benefits as it has to me and many others. God knows I have a long way to go, but He has also sent some little gifts to help along the way. Trees to make into paper, for instance, and carbon to make into ink.