Keep a joynal
I have been keeping a journal pretty religiously for over six years now, and have written one on and off for much of my adult life. It’s a very interesting record to have, but in recent years when I go back over old entries I find a lot of repetition, a lot of focus on the negative: “tough day”, “tough night”, “not feeling great today”, “today was hard/overwhelming”. Et cetera.
So I had the idea the other day to spend more time focussing on cataloguing moments of “joy” in my life, which are certainly as numerous as the moments of frustration and anxiety, but for some reason do not seem to make it into the Hansard of my life as frequently.
This is not a unique idea — “gratitude” journalling is certainly a fad I have heard of, and “joy journalling”, obviously shortenable to “joynalling”, is fairly similar to that. But it felt like a bit of an ephipany to me: a small but extremely meaningful change in focus and state of mind that can have a tremendous impact.
I will finish with a brief list of some small moments of joy from the last few days and encourage anyone who finds value in their journal to dwell a little more frequently on moments that inspire joy.
- Posting about my love of reading plaques and signs in various places around the world to Craig Mod’s “The Good Place” social network and getting great responses that made me feel less like a weirdo — in particular I was turned onto this episode of the 99 Percent Invisible podcast called “always read the plaque”.
- Wearing shorts for the first time this year and drinking an iced americano.
- Rocking up to school dropoff with a takeaway flat white in my Birkenstocks.
- Understanding some of the profound corollaries of Hilbert’s Nullstellensatz which had eluded me when I studied algebraic geometry at university.
- Making a proper penne carbonara with a really well emulsified sauce.
- Realising that any damage I do to myself can stop right now forever and it only depends on me.
Photograph: The Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem.