The other day I found an old journal of mine. This journal is nothing like any journal I've kept recently. This one reminds me of the notebooks I kept as a child, a collection of thoughts, quotations, things I wanted to remember.
Some pages have cut-out pictures from magazines (a precursor to my life maps, maybe?); notes I want to remember, like the china pattern for my high school friend; and words that have an impact on me (another precursor, this one for Power Words).
It's that last that really spoke to me, this bit from a ten-year-old journal. "Beware" was written on a page on a line by itself. It was hard to miss. Another was "Serenity." While they didn't show up on my Power Words list last year, they're both still words that have impact for me.
Now that I've enjoyed looking through it (and catching a glimpse of the person I was then), I'm not sure what to do with this journal. Only a few pages were filled; many are blank. This kind of journal doesn't fit with what I write or do now. I'm not the type of person to just pick up on the next blank page and do something different. My journals have purposes. Sometimes that purpose is general, like with the journal I recently filled - a record of my growth and journey. But that's still a theme, and it doesn't fit in just any journal.
The theme of this old journal is something different from anything I do now. Maybe it will just be a record of who I was those many years ago, unfinished and incomplete. That seems fairly accurate, yes? Aren't we all unfinished and incomplete? If I take that thought further, then what does it mean that I finished a journal? It still is just a record of a point in time; it's not an epigraph; I'm not finished.
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