You’ll Actually Live In The Moment More

Journaling does this incredible fucking thing in that it helps you start to understand how you actually feel about friends, family, and co-workers after doing it for a few weeks.

You THINK you know how you feel about these people, but let me assure you that you have no freaking clue.

Letting thoughts run through our mind can be a visceral experience. We may think back to an old memory, or an old lover, or we may think about something that hasn’t happened at all and find ourselves in a deep emotional rut because of it.

I call it zoning the F out.

Happens to me all the time.

Letting your thoughts run through your mind is like sifting for gold in a river with your bare hands..

Something incredibly valuable may have been in your hands/possession at some point, but you probably never knew it because you don’t have that necessary tools to capture it. And like that it’s halfway down the river never to be seen again.

Journaling puts these visceral thoughts on paper so they don’t get away.

I’m sure you can remember a time where you had a conversation with someone and they interrupt you and then you can’t remember the REALLY IMPORTANT thing you were about to say to them.

Then it bugs you for five minutes and because your brain is old now it’s lost forever, never to be seen again.

Same thing happens to our thoughts.

Turns out we have numerous realizations/straight-up discoveries about our friends/family that enter and leave our mind in a hurry.

When we write we focus on the details. We write about the little idiosyncrasies of an interaction with someone. And most times when journaling we write while the interaction is still FRESH in our minds.

This strengthens our observation muscle.

Then we start looking for little details in our next interaction.

An eyebrow raise. A smile. How they always eat the same thing for lunch every day.

We’re just strengthening that observation muscle more and more — it’s something you won’t understand until you start journaling for a long time.