Take Time to Journal

Spending Time with Me

June 17, 2025. (transcribed from my paper Journal-lightly edited) I haven’t been in the Journal for 13 days. It doesn’t mean I haven’t been busy or active or creative because I’ve been all of those things. It doesn’t mean I haven’t had ideas. It just means I haven’t taken the time to write it down on these pages. Even as I’m attempting to do just that, the keyboard is taunting me that I could do what I’m doing right now much faster. For the majority of my working career I was known for being able to type 110 wpm with almost no mistakes. It is the only thing I can still do without error as I frequently stumble or use the wrong word in a verbal sentence so that it makes no sense. It feels important here to note my successes. I actually woke up this morning with a head full of ideas, and they are miraculously still there. That tells me I’m either doing something right, or the planets have realigned somehow. I’m fairly sure a review of my daily messages to my friend in Florida would reveal I’ve been appropriately and inappropriately processing my thoughts so that’s been covered as well. The Big Project videos were finished up yesterday, and there’s a couple of off camera things left to do, hence the ideas that were born during the evening’s sleep, so even that has been finished. So we are left with the question not of why I haven’t been in my Journal, but why I think I need to do this. If it’s all working, why write it down by hand.

The answer is one I already know. If there is any consistency in my life, my approach to living, my planning and putting plans in place, it is that I am blatantly inconsistent. Nothing lasts forever in that regard with me. I can be on track, on point, on course for a week, maybe even two, and then something happens - some truly undefinable something - and it all falls apart, and there are things that don’t get finished and ideas fall to the wayside like the random seeds dropped by birds when they poop with unconscious abandon. Maybe not that last part because that’s actually part of the intricate ecosystem wherein I have the privilege of residing. I’m also not talking about the hey where did I put my keys or are you sure you told me about that appointment or do I have a blue shirt I really thought I had a blue shirt where the fuck is my maybe blue shirt that I might have. When I fall off point, there are identifiable losses. The plat map of the nearly abandoned family cemetery that I know I painstakingly tried to create. Gone. The 1/8 inch flat disc like silver earrings with black etchings that almost match the silver necklace. Can’t find. The name of the app that filtered thru my phone that led to me creating one of my more favorite altered pictures and then deleted because I thought they wanted money. Forgotten name. I’m not referring here to moments of forgetfulness like locking my keys in my car and not being able to remember the five digit code that would have spared my husband a drive to help me during the hands off shopping spree we had arranged for his birthday. That was a moment of distraction. The losses of which I speak are all things that mattered. They are something that was on a ToDo list constructed at a time when I was on track, on point and solid and then they were gone when it all drifted off.

The drifting has been called depression, over stimulated fall out, distracted by someone else’s emergency. It is likely neuro-divergent, ADHD. I know this. I just don’t really know why I keep coming back to a paper Journal. So much of the advice focuses on putting reminders on my iPhone which would then cause the Apple watch to buzz which would keep me in a more vigilant state as well as give me an easily searchable source when the drifting happens.

I’ve handwritten journals for a very long time, so I know what they do for me. On this day where there’s no rain after what seems like weeks of interrupting showers so everything has been wet and muddy, this day where I woke up feeling so ready, it is more than the need to take the time to write down the wave of ideas. It is important to write — hand to pen, pen to paper, hearing the sound and releasing the feelings and drive behind all this as it gives credence to the moments where it is not just the project completion but the inner growth of the Soul, the Self, the Spirit because I already know I come back here to sit with myself.

In the rush of all that has been going on, I realize I miss Me. It is on the paper pages where I hear Me. From that springs all else - the planning, putting the plan in place, the missteps and the misplaced, the forgetting and remembering. Spending time with Me makes it all possible.