The palest ink is better than the best memory.*
Chinese Proverb

stop believing everything you think**
Campbell Walker

I was recently being regaled by my oldest sister
about accidents I had experienced as a child:
Being thrown across a room by the force of a lightening strike,
Hair all standing on end (this brought back the vaguest of memories for me),
Falling into a quarry when with my dad (I have no memory of this whatsoever) –
Christine say these stories explain a lot.

There are lots of things I do remember, memories that embarrass me, or worse, they
taunt and torment, and for the worst, I am glad I can write them down –
This being harder than it seems, shows me how, often,
I am not remembering the thing itself but some
memory of a memory of a memory;
When I see it laid out, I realise a thought is just a thought and I can leave it there;
I am enabled to rewrite the story in a more positive way –
“I may have royally messed up but I learnt from what happened, changed some things, and
I’m still here!”;
I can also organise the important things and the clutter in a way
that I can’t in my head, so that I see what to pursue and what to discard –
And sometimes I see that it is the tough stuff that is the real gold.

There are many ways to journal – pen and notebook, tablet,
Longhand, bullet points, mind-mapping, illustration, commonplace –
What matters is that we have a means of laying out in front of us all that is usually
crammed inside our head;
Personally, I never do this alone – today I have been accompanied by
Ben Hardy, Campbell Walker, Nick Cave,
Mary Midgley, Seth Godin, Gabe Anderson, some scriptures, and always
my personal myth or story (reminding me of what matters most to me).

I felt like the chaos of my head had flowed through my fingers and into that document – and that I didn’t have to carry it around with me anymore. I even discovered new insights, hiding in the lawless wall of text: epiphanies previously unknown were now glaringly obvious.**

*Ryder Carroll’s The Bullet Journal Method;
**Campbell Walker’s Your Head is a Houseboat.