I noticed that many smart and happy people kept journals. They also reflected more on their life. More specifically, they reflected on the things they learned, mistakes they made, and the goals they achieved.

Memories are important. They are the little pockets of nostalgia we dip into now and again just to remember what the past tasted like and sometimes it was good. In this way, we can build up a whole ladder of memories and reach a whole other world whenever we want it. It's comforting, it's an escape, but why not?

Keeping a journal implies hope.

If your journal consists of the best moments of your life and reading, then rereading it will be like walking a high mountain trail that goes from peak to peak without the intervening descent into the trough of routine. Just reading such a journal of high points will tighten your strings and raise your pitch.

Our achievements speak for themselves. What we have to keep track of are our failures, discouragements and doubts. We tend to forget the past difficulties, the many false starts, and the painful groping. We see our past achievements as the end result of a clean forward thrust, and our present difficulties as signs of decline and decay.

A journal is a record of experiences and growth, not a preserve of things well done and said.

Making memories matters

It's important to always have people who remember you at various stages of your life. It's especially important as you get older, because there are less of those people around. And they remind you of who you are.

People don’t keep journals for themselves. They keep them for other people, like a secret they don’t want to tell but they want everyone to know.

The role of past experience is of high importance, but what matters is what one has gained from experience — blind, understood connections, or insight into structural inner relatedness. What matters is how and what one recalls, hoVi he applies what is recalled, whether blindly, in a piece meal way, or in accordance with the situation.

The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts….We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need — not all the time, surely, but from time to time — to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember — the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.

On Keeping a Journal.

Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptacle for one’s private, secret thoughts — like a confidante who is deaf, dumb, and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could do to any person; I create myself.

The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather — in many cases — offers an alternative to it.

If you remember that something bad happened, and you can figure out why, then you can try to avoid that bad thing happening again. That’s the purpose of memory. It’s not “to remember the past.” It’s to stop the same damn thing from happening over and over.

I've been keeping a diary since I was about 11. If you don't keep a diary everything washes away. And you can live everything three times: you live it when you live it, you live it when you write it down, and you live it a third time when you re-read it. Though I have to say rereading my diary for publication was a depressing experience. You shouldn't look back.