Education Journaling - Begin Again

Why Journal? With all the information and articles available on how to journal maybe we should begin with why we may not be journaling. What stops us many times from even beginning to journal is fear. We may fear that someone will read our personal thoughts; we may fear that we will be critiqued; we may have heard someone say we are not smart enough to understand anything complicated therefore, we feel we cannot think. Someone may have said you have many abilities but writing is not one of them. Another somebody may have suggested that you just do not have a way with words. Whatever the reason we may be dealing with, it is easy to grab hold of these statements. We then believe them and allow them to stay in our hearts and minds. This can paralyze us from starting to journal. What exactly is journaling? Journaling is a personal record of occurrences, experiences, and reflections kept on a regular basis, a diary of sorts. The point of journaling is to write down your history, your own story, as it is happening. So when we do not journal our story, our history, is not recorded. As soon as I wrote the last sentence, I heard hundreds of voices saying, "but my story is boring. My history is not interesting." Wrong! Margaret Smith writes in her book Journal Keeper that "nothing is too ordinary to write about. The word ordinary comes from the word order. When you write in your journal about the ordinary, you are making order out of a jumble of thoughts. Soon you will notice a pattern developing. Events and thoughts that may have seemed random or mundane begin to piece themselves together in a mosaic pattern. The shape of your life becomes easier to see when it's set down on paper." What's your story? Those of us, who have thought our lives shapeless and void of design and purpose, have just not written our "living" down to see the pattern that is developing. But in 2010 we can begin to write our history and story. Begin again. Here is a jump start for the New Year. Billy Joel, a songwriter, wrote the following: "In every heart there is a room, a sanctuary safe from storm." Take your new journal and open up to the first crisp blank page. Write the above song lyric on the first line and then write what affected you today. What affected you by either making you happy or that made you upset or confused. When you are finished, whether you've written one sentence or one hundred, record the date at the top and close the book. Tomorrow there will be more to write. Your history is now being recorded. Your personal time line is now being drawn and soon you will begin to see that you can shape and mold the pattern of your life by what you do daily. And the journaling begins. thesis writing service