This week marks twenty years since I started keeping a
journal. You can call it a diary if you want, I don’t care. It won’t make me
feel any less manly. I was sixteen years old when I started the journal, and
back then I’m pretty sure I called it a journal instead of a diary because I
didn’t want to be girly, but now I don’t care.
That’s just one thing that has changed in twenty years.
I can’t remember why I started keeping a journal. Robert
Parker, my eleventh grade American History teacher, brought his journals into
class one time. He had something like thirty years worth of journals, and I
remember thinking how awesome that was. Simple math tells me that I was in
tenth grade twenty years ago though, so I had already been keeping my journal
for a year by the time Mr. Parker talked to the class about his journals.
I’ve read that initial entry numerous times. The first few
pages of that first notebook have torn away from the spiral binding, and the
cover is gone. The print has faded or dirtied from years of being stuffed
beneath my bed, but it’s still there. I can look at that notebook and read
about the important things in sixteen-year-old Brett’s life.
Thankfully, thirty-six-year-old Brett is a lot different
from the kid who began that journal.
For the most part, there’s nothing Earth shattering in my
journals. Anyone who didn’t know me might not find them too interesting, and
I’m probably flattering myself to think that anyone who does know me would like
them much better.
But that leads me to the interesting thing about journals.
They’re like fine wine: they get better with age.
You can write a journal entry today, and re-read it and
wonder, “Why did I bother wasting my time writing that? It’s banal, mundane,
boring. Who cares that I got the oil changed, and then went out for pizza and then
came home and watched The Americans?”
And if you’re thinking those things, you’re right. No one
presently cares about what you write in your journal.
They’ll care later though!
Twenty years from now you’ll read that same entry and marvel
at how much you paid for an oil change, or long for pizza from that place that
closed, or wonder if The Americans is as good as you remember it. The
entries you write today are going to be different tomorrow, and they’ll change
a little bit every single day because you change a little bit every single day.
You change, people around you change, technology changes, your perceptions
change, your opinions change, your memories change.
Even the way you keep your journal might change. When I
first started I wrote in a notebook and recorded the time I began and ended
each entry. Someday I plan to add up all those minutes to see how many days of
my life I devoted to writing like that. (Exciting, huh?) I deserted the
hand-written journal in favor of writing on a computer a few years back though.
I had too much to write and not enough time to write it by hand, so the
richness of hand-written words had to succumb to the realities of time and
events.
And the more things change, the more valuable it is to have
a record of how things used to be. You might not know of any good reason why
you’d want to know what you did on some random Sunday fifteen years ago, but
you also never know when a journal will come in handy. Maybe you won’t solve
any of the world’s problems with your journal, but the next time you try to
remember whether Uncle Claude spilled the bottle of red wine on the new carpet
at Thanksgiving in 1996 or 1997, you’d be able to look it up if you had a
journal.
So if you don’t keep a journal, you should start. Even if
it’s just a few sentences per day, it’s better than nothing. And even if you don’t
feel like doing it, you should. Someone—maybe even you—will be thankful someday
that you did. And if you think that nothing you say or do is worth writing
about, write about it anyway. Because eighty years from now someone might find
your journal, and they might think that your boring, uneventful day was
awesome.
Imagine what it’d be like to read what your grandmother did
on May 17, 1934. If she kept a journal you wouldn’t have to imagine it. You
could read it. And it’d be much more interesting than she thought!
