I've wondered for a long time about why I keep a journal. I've filled up a few books by now; I started writing when I was in junior high school as a result of being bored in class, and afterwards I just kept making entries. Some of them are a day or two in between but most are weeks or months apart.
Some people write journals as though they're writing to a penpal. "Dear Diary, here's what happened to me today." I don't really do that. I don't write for the purpose of myself or someone else reading what I write at some point in the future. I just find that I think a lot late at night, and if I have recurring thoughts that I can't get out of my head, I just write down those thoughts in my journal.
This blog is similar. Only a handful of people (if any) read it, but that doesn't bother me. I don't write for the readers, mostly. Mainly I write entries here because I type faster than I can write, and sometimes I don't have my journal handy. If I have thoughts that wouldn't be terribly embarrassing to admit publicly, this is a convenient place for them.
But why bother writing these thoughts down? It's not so I have an archive of my life. It's not so I can look back and see how much I've grown; to be honest, I'm consistently ashamed of entries I've written even a few months ago, of the decisions I made or the things I said or did, or just my outlook on life in general.
I suppose some of life's issues are too complex to think about all at once. Humans in general are terrible at looking at the big picture. We prefer to focus on one thing at a time, fact-by-fact. This might be easier but it also leads to having a biased outlook on pretty much everything.
If I write down all my thoughts as they come to me, not in any particular order, eventually there's enough on my pages to externalize the issue and finally see the big picture. If I'm thinking about a problem in my head, it's just this confusing web of thoughts that jump from one to another for God knows what reason. Once it's all on paper, it's just a math problem. A logic puzzle. I can look at everything at once and decide what to do next.
It doesn't apply only to decision-making. I use it to form opinions about the world. I suspect the approach could be used to figure out just about anything.
If you're reading this and you don't keep a journal, start. You'll come to realize your own biases and learn how to account for them. You learn how to look at issues from every point of view and start to see the big picture. You do sort of have to force yourself to write at times, but it gets easier, and you won't regret it.
