Our town provided a free shredding service last weekend, and my contribution was about a thousand pages of long-hand writing on notebook paper. I decided it was time to clear out old journals — ripping pages out of dozens of spiral notebooks that contained a mixture of venting, dreams, and nonsense. The term “journaling” sounds so lofty — what I really mean is a free-flowing brain dump put on paper just to clear it out of my head.
I had not read the contents in the past 20+ years (and certainly did not want others to read them!) so I did some spring cleaning and sent them all to the shredder. My housemate who saw my pile commented on all the trees that were “wasted” by my ramblings. Au contraire! Notebooks are the cheapest form of therapy that I know. The mere act of writing things down is a magical elixir — it moves the emotion from a living distraction in my mind to an amorphous nothing on the piece of paper. And, as with all writing, it gives the gift of clarity.
Writing anything down is the secret sauce for me. My millions of lists increase my capacity to remember and to get things done. Putting ideas to paper helps immensely to flesh out a concept (and its pitfalls) and allows me to implement far more than if I had just thought about them. Writing down my finances helps me be a better steward and saver. Writing letters maintains my friendships. And writing dots helps me pay more attention to the world and make connections I would not see otherwise. I rarely know where a dot is headed until my fingers actually touch the keyboard, but once I start writing it’s like there is a muse sitting on my shoulder whispering new insights.
You don’t need to save what you write, or even read it again, but release the untapped power of your subconscious with your pen or keyboard. The value lies in the act of writing, not saving it from the shredder.
