Have you ever thought about the possibility of losing your memory? If you had kept a journal of the days of your life, now and then you could read it to remember things you had done in the past. I can recall things that have happened that at the time I believed I would remember the rest of my life and then later never think about it again. There are people whom I figured would always be around and then they're gone and I forget so much of the good times I had with them. Memory can be a great friend, but it can also be our biggest deceiver... |
| Private journal, Diary of Henriette Dessaulles, 1874, Ink on paper, 21 x 14 cm (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Journal of Days
Time passes along with births, deaths, marriages, graduations, or this event or that event. The world happens as histories are inscribed for future generations to learn and study-- or misremembered for the sake of societal deception until they are corrected by historians untainted by bias, if indeed those histories are ever made right. Kingdoms may rise and fall, but time remains the constant--a stoic witness to all that passes in a never ending procession of minutes, hours, years, and centuries. Humankind may have discerned the devices for measuring the passage of time, but time itself outlives us all.
Everything we do or think about has some relation to time. Our lives are centered around time as time revolves all around us in the activities of the world outside of ourselves. I used to keep a schedule book in which I recorded upcoming events. Sometimes in the same book or a different record book I'd keep track of meals, gas, motels, and information about the working facilities where we performed the touring show that I managed in the eighties.
Working on the road with a performance schedule, one takes careful note of time. Typically, cast members would leave the motel by check-out, drive a few hours to the next town, have lunch, and then from about 4 until about 9:30 PM we'd set up and then perform our show before tearing it down and moving on. My main tools were my watch, my road atlas, and my trip record book and my journal of days.
Rarely did I get into detail then or in any other attempts to keep journals in my lifetime. There were a few times when I would burst into an ambitious attempt to keep an actual daily journal. The best journal--one that I kept while on a several week hitchhiking trip during the summer of 1971--that journal got stolen in 1981 when our van was broken into in the Holiday Inn parking lot across from the police station in Greeley, Colorado. Lost some good stuff and that kind of dampered my applying much future effort into journaling.
Now most of my days are the same. Not much point in keeping a journal of my days as they pass by. The closest I come to keeping that journal is my blogging. Other kinds of writing would probably be good but I haven't been doing any of that. Just blogging and I do enjoy that activity.
Which brings me to the Blogging from A to Z April Challenge. This will be my journal of days in a sense over the month of April. Each post will take me time to write as well as take the time of whoever might read it. That writing will be part of my daily activity. Hours will pass as will days.
If I were keeping a journal I could reread my life whenever I wanted to--maybe even some day if I needed to.
Do you keep a daily journal? Have you ever found a journal of a relative or someone else? Are you concerned that one day you might lose your memory and sense of who you are?
