Capturing Chaos

I don’t know if I’m unique in habitually throwing away my old journals. It seems that most people keep theirs as a source of ideas, or just to see how their writing has changed over time—how they have changed. One reason I throw mine away is that it’s too tedious to read over so many pages of my handwriting. I had the mad idea of eventually typing all those pages into computer files, but that turned out to be one of those what-was-I-thinking brainstorms.

I’ve tried journaling on the computer in the hope that It would be easier to keep at it, and that I would be less tempted to toss. But it turns out that it isn’t just my handwriting that’s the problem; it’s the repetition. And when I started thinking about that, I realized that my journals have two kinds of material. One is my life; all the moaning about problems and vowing to break out of old habits that keep me from accomplishing my goals. Over and over again. Who wants to look back over the years and face the ugly fact that you’ve been saying the same things pretty much forever, that you haven’t changed and aren’t likely to change?

The other thing that my journals are about is thinking. Very often, I’m working out ideas with no concrete goals except to clarify problems, dig deeper into subjects that I’m interested in, or wonder why the world is in such a mess. There’s a lot of repetition in that kind of stuff, too, but I often come at old problems in new ways, and that can sometimes be very rewarding. So the journaling becomes an exercise in opening my mind and seeing what’s inside. I don’t have to keep any of it, because there are always new insights, and new ways to express them.

Now and then, in rereading old entries, I come across something that turns into an article or a blog post. In a way, the journal becomes a bulwark against having nothing to say and needing something to draw on. In that sense, it’s a repository. When it’s about my life, it’s more like a mirror. I may not like what I see in it, but it’s probably just as important as the repository. Have I just worked out the reasons why it’s stupid to keep throwing away all that writing? It’s a strange mix, but it’s mine. More accurately, it’s me.

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