Window to the past

Oscar Wilde says it best: “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.”

It’s been a long while since I went back and read any of my journals, but this morning I found myself with a little extra time and inexplicably decided to start typing up my mission journals. (I really have no idea why I started, actually — all of the causal chain leading up to the decision this morning has been wiped from my memory. After reading my scriptures, the next thing I knew I had pulled out my first journal — there are five — and started typing away.)

It’s been more powerful than I expected.

A few years ago I began typing up all my journals, starting with my first one in 1990 when I was seven (though it wasn’t till sometime in 1994 that I made it a daily habit). I skipped around a bit, doing some segments from my teenage years, too. It made me cringe. I mean, they weren’t awful or anything, but goodness, I’ve changed a lot in the last ten years. (And thank heavens for that!) I am very, very, very glad I’m not still the person I was back then. (No, it’s not like I was an axe murderer or a druggie or anything. Just very immature.)

I was expecting a similar experience with my mission journals, but luckily somewhere near the end of my high school years, maturity crept in. Which isn’t to say I’m all that mature — how could I, when I’ve got a whole blog’s worth of evidence to the contrary sitting out here in the open? :P — but there’s certainly a difference between young Ben and contemporary Ben. Heck, there’s a world of changes between the me of just three years ago and the me of now. I’ve learned a lot.

Anyway, I’ve only typed up a week’s worth of entries so far, but wow, it’s been refreshing. So much of my mission has been filed away in my long-term memory storage and hasn’t been brought to the forefront since — well, since it happened. And now all the memories are starting to come back. I’ve poked a hole through the ice, and the light of the past is shining through again, illuminating both what’s behind the ice and where I stand today.

That’s the thing about going back and reading your journals — it’s good to review your life every once in a while, to see how far you’ve come. And it resynchronizes our memories with what actually happened. :) The blurry edges of my mission memory are starting to sharpen. And as a result the pangs of nostalgia are returning, which makes it hard, but I’m going to forge onward anyway.

I’ve also picked up some of my journals from just last year and leafed through a few pages. Some of what I’ve read about I was sure happened just a few months ago, but no, it’s already been a year and a half. I have no sense of time. :)

Afterword: For the technologically minded, I’m typing the journals up in XML, using a very simple markup system (<entry> contains each day’s entry, with a <date> tag and then a <p> tag around each paragraph, and if I remember things that I forgot to write about in the original entry, I add an <annotation> tag at the end). When I’m done I’ll put together an XSLT stylesheet to transform it into HTML and/or something I can import into InDesign (or LaTeX) and then typeset.

Oh man, I haven’t started typing up my old journals yet, but I know what you mean about reading through some entries. When I look at some of the things I worried so much about I really want to go back in time and kick myself in the head and say “look at what you’ve got! Everything is so simple right now!” I also had the tendency (and still do somewhat) to only write in my journal when I was upset about something, so I think if someone that didn’t know me well were to read it they would think I was a very depressed, angry person (which I’m not, that’s just mostly all there is in my journals). :P

When everything is going well it just never occurs to me to write it down, I’m just too caught up in it all.

LOL, you’d better start setting the record straight, then. :) I mean, there isn’t any rule that you have to write pages and pages each day — just a few sentences a day go a long way. But of course I’m biased toward the daily entry deal. :) (Honestly, I think writing anything at all is better than nothing. But if nothing is our standard… :P)

It’s nice to go back and read when things were going well, by the way. Feels good. Just saying. :)