Step Eight for an Extraordinary Life: Write it Down

Sometimes things just fall into place.  Sometimes they fall into place so perfectly it surprises you:  like finding two pieces of a polar-bear-in-a-snowstorm jigsaw puzzle that fit together.  No, this isn’t about the box I needed for shipping a violin, which isn’t a box one normally has just laying around the house. (But in case you’re wondering, I just happened to have this very rare, but perfectly-sized box in our basement.)   Instead, this is about the next step toward living an extraordinary life:

I had just begun research into two posts on journaling, one for my readers’ personal guide and the other for you as parents helping their kids start journaling.  Then I learned that August’s extraordinary challenge was write it down, and well, the thrill was even better than finding that violin box.  (Thankfully, as even I’m aware my excitement about cardboard and styrofoam is pretty darn lame…)  And what’s more is that I had just chosen and packed a journal for our family’s upcoming vacation.

It isn’t a new journal, but it’s a special one.  The opening page is dated “7-5-00,” and labeled “The European Marvel.”  A few years later the top of the page announced “Paris April 2002” and after that “Ireland August 2003”.  You see, this is my Europe journal and my family and I were getting ready for a trip to Denmark and Norway.  So I packed my rather cliche, inexpensive journal with a cardboard cover (see, heavy pressed paper obsession!) enrobed with a reproduction of Claude Monet’s “The Artist’s Garden at Vetheuil”.  I couldn’t wait to write down all the amazing adventures we were set to have.

But despite my love for writing, journaling a trip isn’t easy, at least not for me.  I want to get every detail down on paper to preserve the memories, but since we’re busy making those memories, there’s not a lot of time left to write it down.  And writing it down takes more time than I think it will.  So I took some of my own advice and adapted my journaling to our busy schedule:  instead of composing a narrative, I used bullet points to describe the highlights of each day.  It was a list of sorts, to the point (most of the time), and easy to reference.  What was the name of that cool victorian hotel in Balestrand, Norway?  Which restaurant had the good meatballs?  What day did we see the dolphins in the fjord?  A quick skim of my journal will provide the answer in no time, because everything is in bullet-point, not lengthy paragraph, form.   And this method was a ton less time-consuming than writing the journal-equivalent of War and Peace. So I looked forward to my journaling time instead of dreading how long it would take to get every adventure recorded and running the risk of not journaling at all.  Which would have been a real shame.

So write it down.  Keep it easy and don’t worry about making your words clever or memoir-ready, even if your secret desire is for your great-grandchildren to discover your journals and have your thoughts on a bygone time published (a wish of mine even my cardboard box fetish can’t hold a candle to).  Just start journaling.  Keep track of the miraculous and the mundane.  The process can be extraordinary.

Need help getting started? Need some convincing as to why journaling is worthwhile?  Click here for my recent post on the topic.

A charming village on the Norwegian fjord.