“My wife died about ten years ago. We were anthropologists and did a lot of work in the field together. I recently brought out some of our old notebooks and went through them. They were from forty years ago. In one of them I found very detailed field notes from fourteen months we spent living together in an Indian village. Those notes stirred up a lot of memories. I don’t think I’ll go through our old notebooks again.”
Most of you probably wonder why this post affects me so much. It’s because it shows that memories are really all we have, and we’ll forget most of them. Journaling your experiences, good and bad,is a way to keep your memories together, and I don’t ever want to forget anything that happens to me. But there are times where your “journal” (your thoughts, or that time you are looking over) are filled with doubt, pain, and fear, something that nobody wants to remember. Sometimes you forget, but once you look over, you won’t need to look again.