Write it down! Now!

I’ve been on a journaling binge lately.  I do this occasionally so I can remember that I actually can think.  Otherwise I become just a chore monkey.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love a good list of chores to check off. It’s just that when you’re old you tend to make stupid lists of stuff that doesn’t really need to be done.  Have you ever asked somebody who was old to do something and they’ve said they have to clean the house?  What’s to clean?  Two old people creeping around?  The worst that’s going to happen is the remote getting greasy from potato chip fingers. 

So, while I still have giant list of chores everyday, the list includes a lot of stuff I used to blow off. 

Writing in your journal is a great way to “get in touch with yourself.”  And if you’re a person whose heyday was in the seventies, you’re compelled to search your inner soul.  Just like you’re compelled to wear granny dresses and hiking boots and flowers in your hair. 

Studies show that if you write in your journal about a positive experience it lets your brain experience it again. So in theory, if you have an awful life, you could make things up and live a perfectly fine “pretend life.”  Then you could live more easily on your Social Security check because you’d have all that free fun.   

My goal is three pages of writing a day.  Of course, a lot of it is blah, blah, blah, but while I usually don’t have to make things up, it does make me pay an inordinate amount of attention to detail. 

For example, pets seem to lead such interesting lives because it doesn’t take much to make them happy.  I spent about twenty minutes yesterday taking pictures of my cat watching the shadows of the birds in a tree through a window shade in our bedroom.   Then I came back an hour later and took the same picture because he hadn’t moved, but I was able to write about it and thus it became a significant experience. 

I’ve also discovered how much I like my neighbors.  Not that I was going around hating them, it’s just that it occurred to me, when I sat down and thought about it, I really like this group we’ve got around us.     

You absolutely cannot whine when you write because it sets things up like a bad perm.  It’s like gas in a small room, it just fills the space.  You think about it all the time and it turns into the pen and paper version of muttering to yourself.  It’s like the verbal dry heaves.  Once you start you can’t stop. 

Writing does help you remember what you did yesterday, the bane of the after-fifty set.  You sometimes have to start with the one thing you CAN remember, locking yourself out of the house, and then connect the dots forward and backward so you can reconstruct the day.  Game therapy.  Like those squares where you have to move the numbered blocks around until they are consecutive.  1, 2, 3, 4, 5.  

If you do start a journal, I guarantee you’ll find yourself writing more and more.  You become your own best bud, unless you have a dog.  Then you can be your own second best friend. 

You’ll find you love to listen to yourself.  You won’t have to call the kids so often or make suggestions to strangers at the grocery about their purchases. 

Trust me, it will be a real blessing to everyone around you.