I have no problem with journals. Granted, I don’t read many of them (unless
they’re dead, there’s privacy issues).
And this blog alone proves that I have no trouble with writing.
But writing a journal… bleagh.
I think I’m pretty fascinating but when I put what
I’ve done on the page, my inherent awesomeness doesn’t seem to come up. And rereading my journals is awful. When they’re not badly written, I find out a
little too much about myself. When I was
a teenager, I was constantly throwing my journals into the garbage to make sure
posterity never found out what was what.
As I get older, though, the real issue is the
updating. I believe that journal writing
is most effective when written daily.
There are some exceptions to this, but for the most part, if you’re
trying to get across life as it is, you need constancy in your writing. And that is an investment in time. It doesn’t matter what happened in the day, I
always have to take ten or fifteen minutes to get a proper entry in the
journal. Many days, if I don’t plan out
that I’m going to write in my journal, it won’t happen.
Enter Cesar Kuriyama. On a recent TED talk, he discusses a video
project he started that he calls “One Second a Day.” He videos one second of his life every day
and makes a movie of it. If he’s
dedicated to just that second per day, he’ll have a five-minute movie by the
end of his life.
I’m not going to make a movie of my life. Even if I had the proper video tech that I
wanted and the editorial know-how, I wouldn’t bother. It’s a movie I doubt I’d ever want to watch.
But it has inspired me to try a project of my own in
my own journal writing: “One Sentence a Day.”
We all know where this leads.
When I post this, I’ll be three days into this project. I intend to do this for a year, just writing
on only one thing that stood out to me for that day. This is doable and not such a vacuum of my
time as what I’ve been doing.
I am curious, though, what things do you do for
record keeping your life or do you even bother?
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