I’m back from 9 days in Chile — what a great trip. Aside from a head cold I picked up on the marathon return travel day: 26 hours from Rapa Nui to Las Vegas, including transfers in Santiago and Dallas. I don’t get sick often, but when I do it’s always related to sleep deprivation.
I’ve got some posting to catch up on for sure… both the Chile trip and some good times before the trip that I want to remember. That’s what the journal is for, you know, so I can remember what I did with my life. I’ll read it over when I’m dead, I suppose. I wonder if they have decent internet access from the afterlife. They had decent internet access in Rapa Nui, much to my surprise.
So I’ve been doing this journaling thing for a little while now (both on and offline), and I have to say one of the real joys for me is going back and re-reading the things I wrote a year or two ago. I find the entries before that are a little more remote, and I’m not so interested in reading them day-to-day (although I’ll sit down and do it from time to time.) But it doesn’t take more than ten or fifteen minutes a day to check the entries from the last two years, and it helps give me some perspective on my life. What was I doing then versus what am I doing now. What was I thinking then versus what am I thinking now. Where was I going then versus where am I going now. Etc.
Of course different things work for different people, so just because something works for me, I wouldn’t necessarily expect it to work for you. Still, I encourage you to try to read what you wrote some time before your afterlife. I think it’ll be both fun and worth the time and effort.
For example, on November 21st last year I went to see the latest Harry Potter movie (which I didn’t like), ate lunch at Tanpopo (which I did) and was mad at myself for over-answering a casual email (which I still do, no doubt, but hopefully not so often.) If I didn’t have my journal to refer back to, I wouldn’t have remembered any of this!
Oh oh… I did want to reply (a month later). I agree about going back and reading journal entries. I was exaggerating about waiting until the afterlife. I scan back over my entries pretty regularly, and yeah, it reminds me where I’m going and where I’ve been.
It’s kind of scary how if I don’t have some written record I easily lose greater than 90% of my life to mystery and forgetfulness!