journaling

I bought a new journal today. Hot pink, very cool looking. I'm not sure why... my journaling has fluctuated wildly since I started in my teens. And now that I'm blogging, I'm really not sure about the future of journaling.

I started journaling in high school, with spiral notebooks. They were, then, part diary and part interior dialogue, a place to write bad poetry and test story ideas. I had a diary once in grade school, but was very bad at it. I never could think of anything interesting to write. But journals were another story. I even named the high school ones, and pasted pictures on the front of them sometimes. (Especially liked my second journal, entitled "The Return of the Journal" and the fifth, "Journal No. 5" (as in chanel). Okay, so maybe you had to be there.

In the years since, my journaling discipline has waxed and waned. I was especially prolific in the months preceding my stay in Japan: trying to figure out what God wanted me to do (this was many years prior to "The Purpose Driven Life"). Sadly, I inexplicably stopped writing about halfway through my stay there. I'd love to be able to go back now and retrieve some experiences and memories. I think I got so busy doing things I didn't think I had time to write.

Lately, I have found that it has been difficult to maintain a consistent journaling discipline. Could it really be that I have run out of things to say? I would sit down with a pen and not be able to think of a thing that was interesting to say. I would write sentences that I was sure were among the most boring in the English language. Or I would simply do "pre-sermon" pondering -- all right, but sermons shouldn't be the sum total of my life, or all that I write about.

So blogging has (so far) been a fascinating experience for me. I've written more in the last two weeks than I have in months. I think some of it might even be interesting. And it's not the same old same old.

But I miss the pen and ink. I hope I don't stop writing things down, at least occasionally. I like the idea of filling a book, with faces and conversations, with thoughts and opinions.