I’ve kept journals since I hitch-hiked from Florida to California in 1970. I started it because I know I was about to embark on an adventure and I wanted a record of it for when I was old. (This represented incredible foresight on my part at the time.) I’d not anticipated the many benefits of honestly writing down one’s thoughts, so I continued the journal during my time in California and have kept one, spottily, ever since.
The immediate reward is introspection. Your journal is an honest look at the past day, week, or month. It’s a conversation with yourself, a documented one, for better or for worse. It’s also a measurement device. Over the years you see how you’ve changed, how differently you’ve come to feel about things. Sometimes it’s embarrassing to look back on the twenty-something you thirty years later. Personally, if I met the guy I was back in say, 1977, I’d want to kick that fool’s ass. What a smart ass I was sometimes. But that’s evolution, the evolution of a life.
And it serves as a record. When things happened, how they happened, and how you interpreted the events as they evolved in real time. You can refer back to it, but I wouldn’t recommend reading it often. One must change and adapt in life, one matures, learns from mistakes, and often this is a result of the mellowing of memories and regularly reading a journal prevents that mellowing by keeping the instant fresh and often emotionally heated. So,I only re-read some things now and then—most recently of the year I lost two of my brothers, 1973, and the notes from a 1987 summer bike ride from Malmo, Sweden to the small village of Scilla, Italy. I sometimes add dated margin notes of my current understanding—the sight of an older man looking upon his younger self.
But the greatest reward of keeping a journal is that it forces one to be introspective, forces them to analyze their day, their feelings about their day honestly and the fact that it is in the form of the printed word makes it more real, more than just a passing thought. You can lose all your journals and you will still have the life you led and the way you led it because you took the time to look at that life as you lived it. I belief my life would have been different if I’d not kept these journals.