On deep journaling
A short essay on the daily habit of journaling, the importance of self-reflection and curiosity as the base of human inquiry
{Welcome beautiful human, you are now entering another fellow human being’s mind!}
Imagine it is a dark and grey early morning by your desk. You reach for your coffee made just the way you like it. One espresso shot from your Italian moka pot, 20/80 portion to coffee and milk. One sweetener, a teaspoon of caramel syrup.
You put it back down, and now you pick up your favourite black gel pen, the kind you discovered years ago during your first takes on journaling in high school, and open your ruled myrtle green journal. The paper is so soft; you run your hands on it back and forth, palm down, fingertips on the lines, following your fingers with your eyes. It is a piece of blank paper, maybe even the start, the first page of a crisp new journal, staring right back at you.
What do you do? Well, I hope you do not get scared and run away. Instead, you swallow your ego’s built-in inclination for perfection and accept the self-set fate of you writing, no matter what, on this dark and grey early morning.
You might start by noting down the date of the day. December 16, 2023. Then, you put the tip of the black pen down on the perfectness of the ivory page, strictly one line after the date that shall take its precious place in the upper right corner. You start moving your hands in the kind of meditative way that is hard to get the groove of, but once you are in the flow your hands are just flying from left to right, left to right, left to right…
What is on the page? What are on the lines? What is the thread of the story you felt like telling yourself? What is it that caught your attention today so you had to make a record of it?
Zooming in to zoom out. Self-reflection starts where you are now, at this very moment, at this very place, at this very crux of reality. From the tip of your fingers to the end of your toes, your human body, and beyond, the tips and depths of the soul. How many times a day do you use your hands without even realizing the magic of how handy they are? Or even without saying thanks to them functioning well! And how often do you think of how your brain is capable of thinking? The way it is technically the best and most developed “supercomputer” in the world? You are such a magically complex creature, and I personally believe, humans, who are not conscious of how they are, are at serious faults in terms of utilizing their nature-given wonder. Their hands and their minds.
I wonder how many people were actually required to do this at school, in any grade. You are required to calculate tangent, read Dostoevsky, or recall seemingly important historical dates… Nevertheless, have you ever been asked to pause, take a deep breath, genuinely look into yourself, and examine how you are really doing? I bet you have not. (Unless, you had one of those teachers who was judged as “oh she is just different” and whose teaching methods were thought either to be stupid or simply evoked the wide disapproval of the teachers’ room, filled with “conventionally boring” teachers.)
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Going down the rabbit hole of writing out whatever is on your mind, and in your heart. It requires a similar kind of curiosity, as a researcher needs to dig deeper and deeper into the subject at hand and even to follow side tracks deterring the main path of the initial idea. Asking yourself the question: “how am I actually doing?” might have the same effect on you as an interesting research question affects the mind of a researcher, regardless of the area of study. In the case of deep journaling, YOU are the subject of study. Curiosity leads the way, the research inquiry down deep into yourself.
Answering a question with a question, what would be your specific research question if you were asked: what would you like to know about yourself?