I’ve been keeping two journals:
My journaling process was influenced by Austin Kleon and Henry David Thoreau.
Journaling is my way of listening to myself. It doesn’t have to take up an entire hour. Usually, it takes less than thirty minutes. I know that I’ve succeeded with journaling if (1) I have felt ginhawa and (2) if I was able to achieve some clarity about something.
Related
References
Seybold, Ethel. “Proteus.” Thoreau: The Quest and the Classics, Yale University Press, 1951, pp. 1–21.
Thoreau’s journal is largely the record of a search for something he never fully finds: the true and ideal world.
For Thoreau, his journal is his real work, perhaps even his “only” work. The journal contained writing his own biography.
It is not a “circumstantial” journal, one that deals with fact and deed, with the trivia of everyday life, but a “substantial” one of truth and thought; yet not the truth and thought of the public documents, modified, simplified, and presented as conclusions, but truth and thought in the process of evolution. In the journal we can follow Thoreau on every step of his expedition, through one experiment after another, accumulating evidence, testing theories, building hypotheses. We can see him hopeful, disappointed, successful, desperate, acquiescent.