Reliving the Past

Sunday, May 14, 2006 at 8:29 PM

I am the kind of person that "longs for the past". To me, everything that I remember of myself being little was picture-perfect. I long for the days when I was 5,6,7 or 10 years old - living on the WA campus. There was a certain innocence to it all. For some reason - everything in the past seems so much better than it is now.

I was looking over old journals lastnight - and I realized how much I value them. I have four or five filled 3 ring binders with journals, and even more notebooks from when I was younger. The interesting thing that I realized is that the things that I remember from my "childhood" (though I still consider myself in my childhood), are the things that I wrote about. There is a direct correlation between what I wrote and what I remember. Now that I realize that -- I wish even more that I would have written more.

A second observation I made while flipping through these things was that there are certain personality traits that a person always had. I guess I could give excerpts from some of the stuff I wrote as a 9 and 10 year old, but I don't really want to at this point.

Journaling has much more value than 'reliving the past' though. Journaling allows you to see what you were like, how you have changed, and whether that change is for the better or worse. Almost every entry from, well, any year, brings back crystal clear memories of that exact day - it's amazing.