I have a whole shelf of journals. All different shapes. Sizes. Colors. Asian designs, vintage prints, thin and thick, intricate and simple, you name it.
Some of them are completely blank, some half-written in only to abandoned after a few successive days, some battered and full of illegible scribbles, some so thin they have slipped between the cracks in my bookcase, and others of which have a number of pages torn out. The pages currently reside in a decorative box, either stapled, pinned or rubber-banded together, tossed aside for future nostalgic indulgence or speculation.
I could never consistently keep writing. I think my attention to detail is what killed it for me (though honestly that's also what makes reading them great), but to this day I am not so sure the reason. Probably time. Fear or my own thoughts? Maybe. Sometimes reading my old journal entires is like taking a peek into the life and mind of a completely different person; not necessarily a stranger, but definitely not a persona I would identify as "me."
I found some very old journal quotes that in retrospect, make me kind of laugh a little on the inside.
Example: "My mind is a mess I do not want to clean up. A messy room. I'll let the piles of books and papers remain until their pages turn yellow, until their bindings simply mass together into a tower. Bed unmade, clothes strewn across the floor, shoes remaining where I kicked them off...what's the point of picking it up, of fussing over it, if it is just going to get messed up again? I'll watch the dust collect on my belongings, the curtains get eaten away by bugs, the carpets become soiled with dirt, the light flicker into dimness and then finally into darkness, the clock tick its last tock.. And I won't care. I will forget my cultivated mindset and give into this reckless madness, because only after we are abandoned are we truly free."
If I could respond to my early adolescent self it would probably go something like this:
"My mind - my self, better put - is like the old room of a remodeled house. There are some pieces of furniture with very nice qualities to it, and others that may need a patch up here and there. Other things in the room I would much like to forget (the dent in the wall, the stain on the carpet, the way the curtains seem to hang uneven at times), but they give the room a certain quality that I cannot deny - that is has been occupied, lived in, that things have happened in this room that have made it the way it is. Though sometimes it does not seem to fit in with the newer, remodeled rooms, I still try and find time to enjoy and appreciate it. I want to share it with others, if they would make the effort to come in. I have promised myself that I will not remodel, but rather add a decoration or two, perhaps a new fixing in key places, a new paint job to change things up. But to change that underlying floorpan, the nicks and little oddities that make the room...well it would just ruin it completely."
I went to Sea World over the weekend; got soaked to death by the rapids and the Journey to Atlantis rollercoaster, gazed at some pretty fish as they floated about in their tanks, giggled at and felt an interesting swell of pity for all the animals in their psuedo-natural environments, and all around appreciated the beauty of sea life. If God exists, whether he be an ethereal being or the humanistic figure man paints him to be, then he is probably the greatest artist and designer I have ever known.
