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Lately I've found myself wishing I'd written more. Not in terms of art writing (poetry, creative non-fiction, etc), but more around the everyday. I stopped journalling for decades. It stopped being the online thing to do with my crowd after the early 00s. What was I thinking for the fifteen years between. Offline, I have a grasp of the big things: the life events, the big projects I started, my failures and accomplishments. But what about everything that didn't get burned in? The smaller things that make up the vast majority of our lives? I've tried thinking of a few of them for this entry: having coffee with one of my partner's university friends at his house while his daughters ran around; playing in a community band for six months sixteen years ago; playing 31 with my partner and the in-laws.
Today I found an old notebook. A song journal. Just lyrics. A trove, though: reading it, the chords immediately came back to mind. A very particular era: when I stopped writing poetry for a while, I had this idea that I was going to write songs. I can play guitar, sing decently well. Songs have largely replaced poetry as a particular kind of popular art. I have crippling stage fright, but that wasn't going to stop me, was it?
Turns out it did. But that's all right; what's written is still there, just under the fingers. I'd forgotten I had that. My to-read pile has perched in the corner of our bedroom for years, and it was right at the very bottom.
But there in my stacks of almost a hundred unread books I also found lots of other little notebooks, most of them empty. Like many writers, I have...a notebook problem. It's easy to justify buying another: I mean, I do use them! Just not as fast I buy them, apparently. And I usually write in cheap notebooks, to get over the whole, This Is My Deep Thoughts Notebook, Only A+ Deep Thinks Go Here. But I found I had a lot of little notebooks, you know, the ones the size of your palm. And they have goofy cartoony monster faces on them! No serious shit allowed!
So I took one. Had my lunch. Did a little tarot reading and recorded it. A three card spread. I asked three questions on one of those dark figures from years ago. What should I leave behind? What should I carry with me? How should I move forward?
Two of pentacles; eight of swords; seven of swords.
I wrote down the questions, the cards, a quick interpretation. I guess now I have a tarot journal. Or a miscellaneous journal? We'll see if other writing bleeds in. It doesn't really matter, I suppose, though maybe it'll become something interesting someday. Or not. What that object becomes ultimately doesn't matter. Every day helps transform who we currently are. The journal's part of that. It'll work on me silently.
I'm going think of it as a step. All writing's a step. Perhaps something I can use when I'm older to get a better picture of what I was thinking and doing in middle life. Right now I'm active here and on traditional social media - maybe taken together with the archives of so many collapsing sites it'll help me understand myself better twenty years from now. Memory's a funny thing. I remember being eighteen, nineteen, and I could hold everything in my head. But it turns out, as the decades pass, as people diminish or die, as the breadth of my lived experienced grows, not only does perfect recall get harder, my brain starts to hide things away. Only so much capacity? Perhaps a defense mechanism? I hope this helps me remember as life goes on.