I keep a journal for several reasons. Being a student of history, one reason is to document my life for future generations, personal and public. I could consult my journal in my old age to keep memories straight and my family would be able to read about my life after I’m gone. It’s all about giving an accurate account of the past as I lived it instead of how well I can remember it.
The idea came to me while sitting in an honors social studies class as a high school senior. Mr. Roussos was one of the most beloved and influential social studies teachers and began every class with a nugget of wisdom either as a one-liner or a parable we students called “Rouisms.”
One of his most memorable Rouisms urged us to record our lives, not just in photographs or descriptions of those photos but in a journal or diary. When you get older, your memory may not be as sharp, which can lead to mistakes in telling those “when I was your age” anecdotes or answering questions about what happened in your early life. A picture is worth a thousand words but we still put a description with it; just look at any print or online newspaper or magazine.
The invention of writing gives historians and the general public the ability to learn in at times excruciating and exhausting detail from multiple viewpoints what happened at a time and place. Letters from American Civil War soldiers makes the war one of the most well documented conflicts in history as soldiers wrote home from camp and battlefield. Historians have gained vast knowledge of personal lives across places and time because of diaries and journals. Such works have been published, allowing the world to more freely learn about the life and times of ordinary as well as extraordinary people. This wealth of material provides a window into people’s lives that would otherwise cease upon their deaths since relatives likely don’t have the full story, especially how someone felt during an event.
We have a new problem today born from electronic communication. Emails, texts, snaps, tweets, posts, phone calls and messages, they can all be deleted and forgotten, successfully swept under the rug without anyone knowing where to look. And it doesn’t have to be embarrassing communication, just bits of daily life lost in cyberspace that create the story of someone’s life and how they lived and felt about it.
When I write, I jot down not only the events of the world and my life but also my feelings on those events. A common cliché is to always get it in writing. I consider it more than a legal protection. It’s my memory’s back-up hard drive, and even the most confident and gifted tech users have a back-up to reboot the system.
