Is there anything better for the soul than affirmation? It makes you feel all bubbly and weird; a champagne flutter of silly goodness. Hard to keep your feet on the ground when your mind is percolating and fizzing with good feeling. Affirmation is best when it’s made up of little things: a spontaneous embrace from a usually non-romantic loved one; a genuine glad-to-see-you smile from a child; a positive and unexpected comment from your boss on the work you’ve been doing; an exclamation of wonder over something you’ve created.
My good friend Debbie was here last week during my family-free time for dinner and she stayed overnight as well. We were going to watch a movie in the evening, but ended up talking until the wee hours instead. She’s such a huge inspiration to me: a genuinely generous and loving person, an amazing teacher, a motivating and incredible parent and one of the best friends I’ve made here in Sweden. At some point we got on the subject of journaling and life online and I told her about my journal and showed my printed & bound versions to her and was pleased and surprised at her enthusiastic response. She thought it was so cool, so wonderful, and piled on the affirmations until I was quite blushing.
Another friend recently referred to my journal as “intellectual” which made me giggle and, quite honestly, scoff. Intellectual? ME? Puh-lease. For some reason I equate that with some sort of stuck-up literary aloofness, which probably isn’t at all how she meant it. I get the most comments on my Bits of Tid posts, which are pretty much the anti-thesis of intellectual.
I received year 2008 of this here obiter dictum in book form from the publisher in the mail today: the best kind of package! But I was a bit taken aback by how SKINNY it was. I knew I was writing less, but geez! It was as thin as 2003 and that was only 4.5 months worth! Maybe I don’t need to write so much because I’m writing BETTER? Heh. Well, I suppose that if I want more content in my journal, there’s only one way to get it, and I don’t mean memes 🙂
Sometimes my life seems to be in somewhat of a holding pattern. The early swerves and stutters and wobbly pirouettes giving way to the big bounding leaps of young adulthood: relationship, marriage, children, home-owning. Now I seem to have settled—not in a bad way, mind you—into relative peacefulness. I suppose these are what will be the good old days, now when the kids are young and growing and things putter along at an acceptable pace. But as great as it is, it’s not all that exciting to write about sometimes. I wouldn’t trade it for drama and the ancient Chinese curse of “interesting times” certainly, but it does require more effort to winkle out the interesting bits and present them in such as way as to entertain both you and myself.
Two for the price of one! Journaling online brings me pleasure, friendship, a community of readers, and allows me to both practice and improve an art form I love. Transforming my online writings into a printed book that I can bequeath to my children gives me the added bonus of writing for posterity, too. I’d love to have the diaries of any of my ancestors to read, to find out what life was like for them, to read the fleshed-out truths behind the born, married and died dates on the family tree. I’d love to read their stories and hand them down to my children and grandchildren and it’s a goose-pimply feeling of pride AND a quiet sense of accomplishment to know that someday my descendants might enjoy reading mine.
*…is first living a life worth remembering. —Bruce Lee