Throughout our travels, it’s not uncommon to want to jot down our amazing memories, our new, insightful inspirations and our glimpses into a foreign world. These tableaus may find their way into a journal, a diary or even a blog or newspaper travel column. Or they may wind up being plot points on a chronological record used later to share with friends and family.
However they’re used, it may also benefit us to begin to create a pattern of keeping records in our settled lives as well. Paying close enough attention to our interests and goals to track our successes and failures will keep us on task, allow us to see end dates to our objectives and form patters of organization that contribute to a continuum of exponential success.
Having kept a dream journal of the last eight years, I have found that I can look back upon my mind’s creations and recognize many truly amazing patterns in my life. Through a marvel of symbolism and staggering pallet of imagery, I have been able to analyze my current challenges, dissect the complexity and impact of remnant childhood issues, and even understand how I have been host to some of my greatest failures.
These have helped me recognize paths I’d like to create for myself as well as paths I’d rather not take again. And this is a hugely beneficial resource that we all have at our disposal – the answers to all our problems, laid out in a script that was designed for us, by us. But this is not the only record that can be kept, and not the only way to keep it.
The more scholarly of us like to journal, blog and publish books. The illustrators among us doodle and pen our ideas in squiggles and sketches. The musically inclined have an unmatched ability to place our trials into song. And the visually gifted of us sculpt, build and shape a world of similes which depict the nature of their experiences as well.
But, while using life’s encounters to create something artistic to give back to the world is great, each insight we record doesn’t have to be an earth shattering realization of fine art. We can keep a small note pad with us. Cameras offer a great vehicle for keeping visual records. I, myself, have kept a handheld recorder on my nightstand to easily awake and immediately record my dreams, transcribing them later into a Word files on a thumb drive.
No matter what avenue we take to keeping track of our lives, we should make a concerted effort at doing so. Then, once we have a few months worth of information, we should be sure to pour over it with an analytic eye, looking creatively for the best practices that we can enact to form patterns of success.
Are you doing this already? Tell me how in the comments.