Journaling in Old Age

Old man, old woman – it is not too late to start keeping a journal! I started to keep one conscientiously at age fifty-three, and I only wished I had done so earlier. These blogs are often an outgrowth of a journal entry, but the document, the content, is not my journal’s main value; it is the process of keeping a journal that is critical.

Like any good habit, keeping a journal is easy once you etch it into your life – scientific literature says this takes three weeks, but I would give it a few months. I started by disciplining myself (I know discipline is out of favor, but nothing worthwhile is ever done without at least a pinch of it!) to write a certain number of pages each month – ten single-space pages at font size 12. That has not changed. I often write more, but never less. And if I fall behind, I have to make it up by the last day of the month. In the early years, this often meant a lot of rubbish on the 31st! You do not have to write every day, but it’s easier to establish the habit if you do. I put in the date, skip a line, and proceed to discuss what I am reading, how I slept, what I am afraid of, surprised at, hopeless at figuring out. Give yourself lots of leeway. If all you can manage is a history of the day before or an agenda for the day ahead, so be it. Believe me, this will change!

You will find that having the journal to write slowly changes the way you view your life. You will catch yourself marking passages in books to transcribe (a journal works as a wonderful commonplace book) or trying to note exactly what someone says to you (pay attention!) so that you can record it in your journal as accurately as possible. More importantly, you will be turning your life into a narrative – your narrative. Not a Facebook narrative. (Can those people really be so happy? No way. They are either deceptive or deluded, maybe both.) Not a blog. You are not writing to impress anyone (and you should decide up front that you will not share). You are writing to try to narrate your own life. Susan Sontag said that “in the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself.” Take your only opportunity to tell your own story.

I’m in my fifteenth year of doing this. I wish I had always done it – how edifying it would be to be able to look back on how I felt about being a new mother (scared and overwhelmed), how I navigated divorce (scared and overwhelmed) and then remarried (happy and overwhelmed). But the feelings I just put in parentheses are remembered. And we only have to have someone send us an old photo of ourselves or compare reminiscences with our siblings to realize that memory isn’t always completely reliable.

And (with my parentheses) I have just described another benefit (they are endless). You can look back a few months or years and see what you were worried about, what you fretted over – and recognize that those things have just evaporated. They either never happened or were not half as bad as you feared. There is a life lesson. There are many such lessons that we cannot learn anywhere but from our own experience – and experience not reified in words is hard to recall, difficult to grasp, and susceptible to psychological manipulation.  And the “search” function in Word gives me the ability to ascertain when I had a root canal (and sometimes even to settle arguments).

The document itself is a mixed blessing. For instance, there is the problem of what to do with all of this sensitive material – especially as I get older. I am not sure I would even want people I loved to read my daily thoughts (once in a great while you get angry with almost everyone), or have to decide how to dispose of them. I print out the journal monthly for vague reasons that may have something to do with the strange satisfaction of seeing the record of my life turned into copy, hole-punched, and piled up in loose-leaf binders in the closet. But I do spend time thinking about the appropriate moment in my life for a bonfire. But again, these problems are outweighed by the advantages.

So, try it. I recommend it and so do many wonderful writers and thinkers. The product is valuable. Salman Rushdie cautioned us to “never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things — childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves — that go on slipping, like sand, through our fingers.” But it is really not the product that is the most important. It is the process. The daily exercise of trying to make sense of your own life. Is there a better way that you could spend your time?

I am not posting a story this week, but if you want a smile, try Rich Schram’s blog at funreadsbyrichschram.blogspot.com. I particularly recommend his “Sheetrock Ballet.”