Legacy

Long-time journalers repeatedly confirm, what they once scribbled in a journal came to be their design for living and the blueprints for what would become their greatest contributions.

Keepsake Journaling

Your hidden nuggets of wisdom, your observational humour, your core values, your struggles, your creative output all add up your memoirs, a record of your life, of your friends, family and experiences. Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could read through the journals of our Great-Great Grandparents to better understand them, there hopes, dreams, aspirations, what life was like back then? My grandfather kept a journal when he was a Naval Officer in South Pacific combat in WWII. Reading the words of a 20 year-old confronted by horrific bombardment and casualties was an experience he could never replicate verbally decades later. It’s definitely Smithsonian material. When we are young we don’t think about our legacy much. Perhaps it’s because we haven’t created much yet. Our portfolio isn’t strong enough to create a “legacy”. Like an artists portfolio our journals represent, more than just our finest ideas and most profound work. Our entries compose our trials and tribulations, our successes, failures and determination. In his journal Benjamin Franklin wrote at the top of each page, “what good shall I do this day” and at the bottom of each page, “what good have done this day”. That process, the process of journaling to develop his daily power of intention, almosts tells me more about the man than everything he accomplished in between those captions. Journaling is your record, your movie, your album, it’s like your own reality TV show. Beyond digital imagery, your journal represents something original and raw, recording where you were at that moment in time. Someday we will realize that our greatest struggles became our greatest triumphs. Things can be messy but recording where we started, where we came from, and how we got here is about as real as it gets. Imagine finding a file of old photos from a family member. However, that family member is not alive to provide the narrative. It’s just a box of fun, interesting old photos without the story. I have these great old photos, of my mom’s family of 7 visiting the Grand Canyon in the early 1960’s. The station wagon, the clothes, the funky sunglass and my tiny baby mom. Only by chance did I find out from an Aunt before she passed that those weren’t vacation photos, they were photos from after my Grandpop lost his job in Chicago, he boldly packed up his whole family in a 1956 Pontiac Chieftain station wagon and moved to California. If not for that trip my mom never would have meet my dad. Having images in the cloud and photo albums is great but without the narrative they’re just like that old file of photos. Legacy is about telling our story and leaving something behind for our next generation. Hopefully amongst the mix of memorabilia we leave behind a part of our higher selves. Anne Frank was just a little kid writing about what happened to her and her family. Her diary is now not only an important part of history but has provided solace for millions. One of the most liberating and creatively stimulating aspects of journaling is developing an open and honest dialogue. This might include your fears, insecurities and weaknesses. We have blogged about the life changing benefits of self-evaluation and want to stress here the absolute necessity to have a journal which is honest and unedited, perhaps not for the eyes of others. This is why so many people also have separate family journals, vacation journals, high school journals, college journals, project journals and recovery journals so we can revisit these important times in our lives. Much like creating our own yearbooks, only we get to chose the content and write the captions. Weather your journals are part of your shared legacy or private legacy, value them as keepsakes to be preserved for the ages. Think of your journals to as time-capsules to be re-opened, pondered and enjoyed again long from now. Knowing who we are has a great deal to do with what we once were and where we came from, our experiences and evolution. As much instant gratification as we get from spontaneously creating and bringing our thoughts to life by journaling, the gratification down the road from having an enduring record of all we have created and experienced is 10 fold.