I seem to have gotten out of the habit of keeping a record of my days. Though I’ve never been obsessive about it, keeping track of what and where I ate, places we visited, and interesting things we encountered was my custom.
Before I was a blogger, that is, before July 2005, I carried small wire-bound notebooks (and frequently still do) in which to record my thoughts and observations. By the time I started blogging, I had a stash of little notebooks in which I had jotted notes. I tended to write the dates of my notes, so later when I reviewed the notebooks I was able to reconstruct the sequence of events. I don’t know now why I did not keep all of those notebooks. Somewhere along the line I either discarded most of them or lost them. Only a few of them remain.
Subsequently, I used my blog—both this one and several other ones (some of which still exist)—as the repository of my recollections. When the mood strikes me, I rather enjoy reading what I wrote, not because of the quality of the writing, but because of the memories the writing triggers.
The volume of memories contained in the huge numbers of posts I have written is staggering; so very, very much can happen in ten years. But the posts cover more than the last ten years. On many occasions, I wrote about earlier experiences, things like my parents’ deaths and the rare recollections from my childhood.
Lately, I haven’t been using my blog as a journal as much as I have done in the past. I think I might start using it in that fashion again soon. Perhaps, instead of recording my thoughts in my daily “ruminations,” I may write about my daily experiences and progress toward objectives I set for myself. I’ve done a bit of that with Facebook, but sorting through Facebook posts is far more difficult and time-consuming than searching my blog.
I look at what I’ve just written and notice my use of “might” and “perhaps” and “may.” It seems I’m not quite sure of what I’ll do, doesn’t it? Well, I’ll do something, even though I don’t yet know with certainty just what.
