Once upon a time

I first started journaling when I was in secondary school. 1991 I think. I recently opened a chest and pulled out the dusty old diary. Somebody had gifted it for my birthday.

Since then there have been many more journals. I start a new one every year.

There was a time when I would spend the first few days of the New Year reading the previous years diary yo see how I have grown, how I have changed and what I have accomplished. I would then open my new journal and write on the first page all the dreams I have for that year, everything I want to have done by the end of 365 days.

No time for all that now. I still keep a journal but reflection is something that you need hours and at times, days alone for.

Sometimes though I open this chest and just glance through a few pages and I am shocked by what I find inside. So long ago, memories I have blocked out because they were so painful. Some stuff made me laugh. Then I came across this notation, "Mary says if you can look back on a year and you have not laughed or cried, then you have NOT lived." Very profound this friend of mine. Always hits the nail on the head.

Anyway, I opened my first diary and of course it was very amusing. Very kiddie too - lots of newspaper and magazine clippings about the New Kids on the Block. I was crazy about them back then. There are a few poems about love, cause you know, that age, teenage crushes and all.
But there were also two things in that that turned out to be very important in my future.

One was a quote/poem by Anne Morrow Lindbergh:

"A good relationship has a pattern like a dance and is built on some of the same rules. The partners do not need to hold on tightly, because they move confidently in the same pattern, intricate but gay and swift and free, like a country dance of Mozart's. To touch heavily would be to arrest the pattern and freeze the movement, to check the endlessly changing beauty of its unfolding. There is no place here for the possessive clutch, the clinging arm, the heavy hand; only the barest touch in passing. Now arm in arm, now face to face, now back to back -- it does not matter which. Because they know they are partners moving to the same rhythm, creating a pattern together, and being invisibly nourished by it."

This turned out to be the theme around which my wedding centred, and with which we hoped our marriage would centre too. Partners in the same rhythm, creating a pattern together and being nourished....

The second was a quote by Joseph Pulitzer:
"A journalist is the lookout on the bridge of the ship of state. He notes the passing sail, the little things of interest that dot the horizon in fine weather. He reports the drifting castaway whom the ship can save. He peers through fog and storm to give warnings of dangers ahead. He is not thinking of his wages or the profits of his owners. He is there to watch over the safety and welfare of the people that trust him."

I had copied that down from the Reader's Digest in 1994. I was in my first year of journalism studies but I had no intention at that time to become a journalist. Yet, this was the kind of journalist I strived to be, at least at heart. Every time I saw injustice I remembered his words.

It is my experience that journals are an asset. They show you where you have been, what you did there; why you did or did not do something. They remind you why you made certain decisions and by this, help you stick to them.

Journals are like the perfect listening ear. They do not interrupt or tell you what to do. They cannot judge you or use what you said against you. Most importantly, they will not repeat what you shared of yourself to someone else.