Travel Journal Preparation

Every time before I go on a trip, I go through a ritual. I pick out my travel journal.  I must admit, being a journal addict, I rarely had to actually go out and buy a new journal, because I buy them when I find them, which means I usually have a selection at home. Not so much with travel journals usually, but this time I was lucky. I had bought one while wandering through a shop, and found a lovely journal on sale, and I had another one that my sister gave me for Christmas a year or so ago.

 

I decided to go with the one my sister gave me, because I like it better, and I was saving it for a reasonably long trip so I could fill it. It has quite wide rules, so with pre-trip journaling, on-trip journaling, and post-trip journaling, I should be able to fill it. At least I should, if I don't get lazy (sometimes that happens.) So now the journal is selected.

 

First step is to write down dates of the trip on the front page, then create couple of pages for an Index. Then I start with bit of pre-trip journaling. Include itinerary, expectations, why I picked this destination etc. Whatever I fancy really. That way, I also experiment with different pens and find out what works better on each journal, so that I know what pens to take on my trip.

 

Besides breaking in a new journal, the most exciting part is doing research on travel journals. I must admit, I don't really need to do this - but I enjoy it. Often I would just browse through pictures of people's travel journals on Google images or flickr, or I would read articles about keeping travel journals. It motivates me. It inspires me. It gets me excited about my travel journal.

 

Travel journaling is very important for my own memories, but it is also a learning process. I aim to make each of my journal better than the last one, to capture the full extent of my experience. It doesn't always happen, because sometimes at the end of a long day, I can't be bothered to write. Sometimes I end up writing too much about my feelings and not enough of facts, or sometimes too many facts and not enough about my personal impressions.

 

Also, being a good travel journal keeper helps tremendously with regular journals. It is the same process. It is just that quite often we forget to look at our everyday world with fresh eyes. We forget to look for exciting things, just because we walk past them. So whenever I keep a travel journal, I inevitably get much better involved in my day-to-day journal too.

 

What about you? Do you keep travel journals? Do you have any special methods of selecting a journal? Do you write every day on your trip, or occasional tid-bids?

Affirmation Experiment

I believe in the power of the mind. I believe in positive thinking. But, I am not sure if affirmations actually work. And before I hear any of the cynics complaining, let me clarify - positive thinking by itself doesn't solve anything, but when you use that positive thinking to perform positive actions then it creates wonders.

Affirmations is supposed to add to that mental awareness, and will power. Lots of people swear by them. I have never tried them for long enough to make a judgement. So I have set myself a mini-experiment.

September 1 to September 30 - 30 days of positive affirmations, and of course I shall journal about this experiment, and note any results I may note.

I invite you to join in. You can start today, tomorrow, next week. Think about any goal you want to achieve, any weaknesses you may want to over come.

There are few basic rules that apply to affirmations:

1. They must be positive. i.e. - "I don't want to be a failure" is not positive. Instead what you want is "I am successful"
2. However, "successful" is too broad. Be specific. What do you want to do?
3. Use present tense. Imagine as if you have already achieved your goal. Use present tense. "I am working out every day."
4. To begin with, focus on one or two goals. If you start with too many affirmations, you will split your focus, and they may not be very affective. I would say, ideally, start with one goal. I am experimenting with two - but simply because both of those goals - Fitness and Writing - are of equal priority for me at this point in my life, so I can't chose one.
5. Write your own affirmations. I know there are plenty available on the Internet for free. Look at them by all means, but then reword them for yourself. If you create your own affirmations, they are personal to you. They will have more impact.
6. Start with positive attitude. If you are adamant that it's not going to work, then it probably won't. So keep an open mind. Go with the flow, and see what happens. I don't know if they will work or not, but I am willing to try, and put my utmost faith in it for 30 days. Even if I don't see tangible result, I would have lost nothing by telling myself some positive things.
7. Don't have too many affirmations. Be specific, and concise. For each of my goal, I have created 5 affirmations. For quality experiment, you should be able to repeat them every day. I intend to repeat them every morning, and every night. If I have time, I will write them down several times too. I will keep a copy of them on my PC where I can see it at home, and a copy of them in my Filofax so I can see it during the day.
8. And lastly, make notes on how they make you feel. Or if you feel like it, write your affirmations in your journal every day. For any experiment to be successful, results must be noted and measured. If you don't keep track of anything, how will you know whether you have succeeded? Mind is a funny thing. You may think your attitude has changed but it could be just the memory tricking you. And if you only achieve small changes (but positive nonetheless) they will be hard to see without some form of record. So use the journal.

I will do post(s) on how my experiment with affirmations go. If you have any experience / opinions about them, please share your views.

My Current Journals

Since I always go on about Journaling and how wonderful it is, I thought I would share my journals with you.

Yes, I use them all at the same time. So what are they for?


From left to right...


1. Tarot/Oracle Journal - I use it periodically, whenever I go through a phase of doing Tarot or Oracle readings. I use them either as prompts or as a psychological tools for exploring my jumbled thoughts. It's a quality spiral bound notebook, with nice thick pages, so fountain pens work especially well. 


2. Writing Journal - It's a large, ruled moleskine. I use this fairly regularly, but not based on any schedule. In this I write any new ideas, new things or ideas about current WIPS, new techniques or something that I might like to experiment with, any writing epiphany, character details - anything and everything that is related to writing.


3. Self-Improvement Journal - It's a large, moleskine sketchbook. I started this as an experiment to cure bad habits, and for a while wrote in it every day for stuff I was focusing on, including goals, tasks. Now, I don't use it every day (so bad habits won), but I still use it for ongoing things that I am working on.


4. Dream Journal - "Nightmare Before Christmas" spiral bound notebook. I wandered into Disney shop once, and this was on sale, and I thought it was perfect for a Dream Journal :-). I use this to write down any dreams I remember. Like Tarot this also goes through phases, because I have noticed that I remember dreams easily if I make the effort to remember them, and plan to write them down.


5. Personal Journal - handmade parchment style pages. This is my regular journal, which I use almost daily. I hate missing days. This one gets everything - personal stuff, writing stuff and any other stuff that comes up. This particular journal is getting a lot of attention because i started it on March 18, and now I am on Page 60. It will be finished in April. And then I have got other new gorgeous journals waiting :-))


So there you go - my journal obsession laid out - and I love them. 

Journaling with Honesty

Everyone knows that journals/diaries are private. Everyone knows – even if they put the conscious aside – that no one should read someone else’s private journal without permission. We have this social courtesy embedded in us because we believe that private journals include a person’s most innermost thoughts and secrets. But the question is, how much of a person’s true self is placed in their journals? This question doesn’t require an answer so much as reflection. I have been thinking about this quite a lot recently. I know for a fact that my earlier journals were more of a recording of day-to-day events, and outbursts of feelings, usually negative. But just writing about how you love someone, or hate someone, or are upset with someone, doesn’t mean you are sharing your self in those pages. Unconsciously, I censored what I wrote. Not in everything, but in great many things. I realise that now when I look back. Something that seemed either too horrible to write, or something that made me feel guilty for thinking it, I didn’t write it. Writing down those things would be an admission that one thought those things. But if not written, then it would be forgotten. Lately, since I started making more conscious effort to search for self through journaling, I have begun to change it. If my journals are to be a place for my private thoughts, then they must have all of me – good and the bad. If I am to go deeper in my own mind, attempting to unravel the puzzle of my own personality, then I must understand all aspects of my personality. It has been a gradual progress, but I am getting there. As soon as I question whether I should write something down, I do. If it makes me hesitate whether it should be in my journals, then it should. I have come to believe that no matter what your reasons are for keeping a journal, unless you do it with complete honesty, it defeats the purpose. If you keep it for yourself, for memories, for therapy – what good are those things if they don’t show you the truth? If you keep it as a legacy to your descendants – it would be travesty to give them an incomplete picture, because by doing so you are creating a fake history. By doing so you are lying not only to yourself, but to the future. What is your opinion? How honest are you in your journals?

Naming my Moleskine

When I first started keeping a diary, I used to start with traditional "Dear Diary". Then as my diaries became journals, I stopped doing it. It just felt silly to start with a "Dear Diary" so I just start with a date.

I don't usually name objects (except Teddy bears obviously), but when I got my netbook, I knew *he* had to have a name. He is Finn, and that's how I refer to him, and I totally adore him.

Anne Frank calls her diary, Kitty. She has turned her diary into an actual person, and she writes as if confiding into one friend she can trust with her innermost thoughts. It made me wonder if I should give my journals name(s). I don't share all my thoughts with anyone. Never have, and I doubt I ever will. In journals, I try to be as honest as possible, but sometime there is automatic censorship. So I wondered, would it make a difference, if I felt I was writing to a friend?

My journals are extremely important to me, so I certainly don't see them as mere objects. But to name them would be to personalise them. Anne consistently called her diaries "Kitty" because she was actually writing letters to a friend. But I see each of my journal as individual entities, though connected. It would feel totally wrong to call them all by same names, and yet you can't get close to many different friends.

So as I was writing in my current moleskine that I use for private journaling yesterday, I wondered if *she* should have a name. I haven't decided yet. Perhaps it is easier to write to a journal than a person, even if fictional. I don't know.

How about you? Do you ever name your journals? Does it make the experience of sharing your soul any easier?

Inspired to Journal More

I am always on the look out for ways to improve my journaling techniques. The improvement is more about developing good habits, remembering to do new things rather than sticking to old ways. My journals often tend to be filled with my thoughts and feelings, and the real world that I live in, gets quite neglected. I would like a balance. Recording and exploring feelings and thoughts is fine, but I also want to be able to look back and read about what's happening in the world about me. So every time I read an article about journaling or read someone else's experience, I make a note of what I like and try to implement it.

Current inspiration comes from an amazing source. I started reading, "The Diary of a Young Girl" by Anne Frank. Most of you, no doubt, have heard of Anne Frank's Diary, a young jewish girl from Amsterdam who went into hiding with her family for 2 years during World War II, before they were finally caught by the Nazis. Anne started her diary when she was 13, and wrote in it for 2 years of her captivity. It is touching, and it is wonderful, all the more so because it is just a diary of a teenage girl. She is honest in her recordings, and though war plays a great part in her entries, at its core, it's about Anne - the person. It also strikes a chord with me because I seem to share quite a few personality traits with Anne. So much so that few of her passages could have come straight out of my own diaries.

I love reading other people's diaries - historical of course, because for one, I don't know anyone in real life who keeps them, and also because it's such a personal thing that most people would not want to share it. I know I certainly would not.

So what Anne's diary has inspired me to do? She has inspired me to be honest with myself in my journals. Granted, in her later entries she does mention that she can't believe how indelicate she was in writing some things, but I think it's a good thing. Despite a journal being a personal thing, sometimes, mind automatically censors. I have improved considerably over the years, but I could do with more.

It has also inspired me to find other published diaries, and read more, not only to see what I can learn but also to learn about those people's journeys through their own journals.

How about you? Do you like reading other people's diaries? Do you like to improve your journals or are you happy with what you have?

Journaling to Unearth Your Memories - Prompt 3

Places We are very much a product of our environment. The place where you grew up, places you visited as a child, places you wished you could go, they all contribute to who you are today. Make a quick list of places you remember as a child. It could be anything: name of your hometown, favourite playground, a park, beach, school, friend's house - anything. Don't think too much. Write by instinct. Once you have this list, then go through each item, and again just by using your instinct do a quick brain storm. Write down words and phrases that immediately come to mind. Once those immediate associations and memories are written down, then you are ready to dig a bit deeper. Now go through each item carefully. Think about what kind of memories that place invokes in you? Happy? Sad? Angry? Frustrated? When were you at that place last? Would you like to visit it again? Do you get to see it as much as you would like? Would you rather not see it at all? Why? Do you miss that place? What do you miss about it? With each of the questions you answer, you should have a better understanding of the importance a particular place holds in your life.

Journaling to Unearth Your Memories - Prompt 2

The things we fear tell us far more about ourselves than we realize. Not all reasons are deep, but many have layers that we hardly ever peel. So today, think about fears. What did you fear as a child? Fear of the dark? A monster under your bed? Or perhaps you feared a grizzly uncle or even an older sibling or one of your parent? Make a list of all the things and/or people you remember being afraid of. Don’t think about it. Just make a quick list of anything that comes to mind, even if the fear was short lived. Keep going until you can’t think of nothing else. Once you have your list, go through each item one by one, and in detail first write what you remember. For example, you remember being afraid of your great aunt Nelly. When was this? Do you know why you were afraid? Did you do something wrong and were trying to hide it, or was it simply the way Nelly was that made you afraid? Or maybe she was drunk, and you were always afraid of her when she was drunk? Write all you remember about feeling that fear. Now try you think of it from an adult perspective. Do you realize now why you were so afraid? Is the reason quite different from what you remember as a child? What does it tell you? Does it tell you that you have changed, or is it simply your perspective that has changed? Now go through the list again, and again in as much detail as possible, write down if you conquered that particular fear, or is it still there? If you did conquer it, how did you do it? If those fears still exist, dig deeper. What exactly are you afraid of? Is there any way you can overcome them? Do you want to overcome them? This prompt could be used on ongoing basis. As you grow and change, so will yours fears. Good luck, facing them.

Ending Journals

This is my "Everyday Journal" #15, almost near an end. I love ending journals. Because by the time I am at last few pages, I usually have a new journal waiting. This time is a brand new moleskine. I have already talked about my moleskine love in the previous post, so I will spare you that.

Ending journals is practically a ritual, in a sense that I always end my journals reflecting on the journey I have been on during the course of that journal. Between the pages of each journal, a part of my life resides, a part of my very soul even. Not all pages are deep and emotional. Often many are pointless chatter, rants or even just endless list of goals. But each of those pages contain a part of me, and by the time I get to the end, in the last few pages I always pick up things I have learned along the way, or the things I need to focus or reflect on. I don't even need to look back to old entries. My subconscious is automatically picking up on things recorded between those particular dates.

Each ending of a journal is not necessarily closing a chapter in life, but rather opening new doors, finding new directions. And then each new journey takes me forward in some of those new directions.

Moleskine Love

For years, I had seen moleskine notebooks in the shops without being the least bit tempted by them. They were ordinary, black bound notebooks. Nothing special. Definitely not worth the price. Especially when I could get much fancier journals for a better price. That was my first opinion of moleskines. The fact that Hemingway and Picasso used them had no influence over me. They weren't exactly living in the golden age of stationary shopping. So every time I went journal shopping, I ignored those inconspicuous moleskines, and carried on buying different journals. Then in June 2009, I was looking for a perfect travel journal. I considered buying one from Paperblank or Paperchase, which I have used before, but I wanted something different. While researching on the Internet, I came across moleskine websites, and then ended up on moleskine art pages on flickr, and I was lured in. What I found alluring was the fact that there were actually tons of people raving about moleskines, and that there were whole groups and communities about them. Not only that but there were international exhibitions for moleskine art. So there must be something special in those journals. So I ordered a large moleskine sketchbook to try it. Once I started using it, I was hooked. It is impossible to explain to normal people, but the stationary addicts amongst you will understand - writing in those pages is pure pleasure. I have since then used few different moleskines for various purposes, and each one is perfect. I have always enjoyed the act of physically writing, but moleskine takes it to the next level. I no longer look for fancy journals, and I know that once I use up what I have already got, the only new ones I buy will be more different moleskines. What do you think about moleskines?