Journal Keeping

Travelin’Oma Week 6, Day 1. Oma had some family emergencies last week and so we had a little break. I missed it! I’m so glad this class is 12 weeks long!

Journal keeping.

I have four very good examples of people that come to mind when I think of excellent journal keepers. Debby (my sister), Rebekah (my cousin), Tom (my uncle), and Jenalyn (a friend). They have been fabulous at providing a benchmark of what I strive for but fall tremendously short of. In fact, the rest of our family often calls Debby when in need of finding out when something in the past may have happened (even if it was important to us and not central to her own life) – it is often recorded in her journal. In my ideal life, I am a perfect journal keeper. But in reality, I am VERY far from it.

I think the main problem with this is that I am such an all-or-nothing person. If I can’t do something all the way, I don’t like to do it at all. So a 4 sentence entry in a journal isn’t worth it to me when I know that I would really need 4 pages to do the memories justice. This all-or-nothing attitude is something I have been working on for years and am getting much better at in general, but sadly, it still applies in a significant way to my journaling efforts.

In an attempt to overcome this, I am going to record here 5 ways that I have kept up with my personal history in other ways throughout the years so that I can remember that I am doing something to record my life, even if not in ways that I think of as “ideal.”

1. Weekly family update emails
2. Blogging
3. Photo albums
4. Letter writing (with copies of the letters)
5. Verbally sharing memories together as a family so that the memories stay fresher in my mind so that when I get around to writing them down they are easier to remember.