Put your life on paper

Many teachers of writing recommend that you keep a regular journal. I’ve been doing that a long time and now have a battered collection of notebooks going back to the early 1990s. On of my greatest regrets is losing a 1980s journal, carelessly slipped under my seat on a flight to Hong Kong and then forgotten. I knew I shouldn’t have had that extra glass of wine with lunch over the Pacific!
But all these years later I’m still journaling every now and again because the entries are so interesting to look back on later. That’s especially so if I’m writing not about what I’m doing but how I’m feeling. Sometimes it’s amazing to see what foolish worries you had a few years earlier. Sometimes it’s alarming to see you’re still stuck in the same mindspace!
There are times when I’m really committed and pay attention to my journal at least every few days. I like taking it to cafes and scribbling away over a coffee. I may draw sketches in my journal or paste in pictures or clippings.
And then I get busy and suddenly a week or a month slips by and I’ve blown the routine and recorded nothing.
Of course, I’m usually finding time for Facebook - but we all know how long those entries last!
Facebook or Twitter will never be as good as private, on-paper musings for yourself, or an intimate note to a friend. We love all the new forms of online social networking. They’re fast and dazzling. But even as we’re enjoying them we sense how brittle these communications are. Millions of words and pictures are zooming around the planet, all bright and shiny but somehow insubstantial.
They are utterly different from, say, the pile of old family letters that have come to me down through several generations – the paper thin and fragile, the 19th century pen strokes turned so brown and faint with age that I hold each sheet as tenderly as I’d cradle an ancient and precious piece of a hand-embroidered christening gown.
Despite its age the handwriting reeks of the personality of those who held the pen. All the individual flourishes and swoops reveal so much about them and the age they lived in.
When my great grandpa, Joe, wrote to his brother he always signed his notes formally with, “I am, your affectionate brother, J. F. Buddle’. Those six words plus initials, so airily dashed off, would be replaced today by a much shorter sign-off, such as “CU, J.”
But even in 1880 they had their own form of shorthand. Joe’s “affectionate” was always compressed into a squiggle at the end of the word. Of course Joe knew Tom would understand the squiggle, just as we now understand ‘CU’ as text-speak for “see you”. Those squiggles were probably frowned on by language pedants then, just as text language is now.
Will our emails and Facebook entries still be accessible to people in 100 or 200 years? Maybe. But even if they are in some vast cloud-computer or holographic library, the sheer bulk of them will condemn them to obscurity. All the more important then for you to put your most important thoughts on paper as well onto digital media. Remember, the digital storage methods will all change. Already I have files on floppy disks that I can no longer access because technology has dumped that idea.
However, this advice requires taking a very long view. My great grandpa would have been astonished if he could have known that his own business letters and snippets of family news could still be read by his descendants 130 years later.
While none of us can know if our musings will last in any form for 10 years, let alone 100, it’s still worth writing about our lives just for ourselves. It’s the best way I know of sorting out and shining a light on what’s happened on our path through life.