The two following paragraphs come from one of the many journals I have kept in the course of what is becoming a long lifetime. Written in July,1971, this passage describes my experience driving across the country for the first time and by myself. In addition to the external adventures of this journey, interior events crucial to my future were occurring as well. The fateful questions raised then were to find a decisive answer five years later when I left the ministry.

“Week-long search for America and myself. The idyllic moments: driving
in the evening through a plain bordered by mountains, all of the landscape
lit by a brilliant sun out of clear sky. The rhythm of the trip: sometimes
sheer speed, with the feeling of piloting a light plane; other times,
laborious plowing through roads under repair.

“The issue is clearer for me now, though not the solution. Is celibacy a culturally determined thing foisted upon me for which I have no calling? Or is it simply the background to a call which must be accepted bravely and lived austerely in faith? This is the central and agonizing question which this trip with its distance has made clearer.”

As an enthusiastic journal keeper, I hardly stand alone. Journal writing is wildly popular in America. Each year some ten million blank journals are sold in stationery stores; another four million keep journals on computers, it is estimated.

These facts and much other information I have learned from a fine new book written by Alexandra Johnson, whose knowledge of journal keeping is surely unsurpassed. Entitled “Leaving A Trace,” this inspirational yet practical volume shows how journal or diary writing can enrich the life of just about everybody. I found fascinating her excerpts from the journals of people both famous and ordinary and her commentary on them.

In her introduction, Johnson, a veteran teacher of writing and an author resident in Medford, shares her own fascination with the diary of Elizabeth Howe, a woman who, in the late nineteenth century, lived in the house where she herself now lives.

As Johnson tells it, “The pages chronicle a twenty-one-year-old music teacher secretly thrilled by solitude, love letters, fresh peaches wrapped in tissue, ice storms filigreeing the windows at night with crystal spiderwebs.”

More important, Johnson discovered in Howe's entries a woman trying “to find a narrative shape for her life, a way to tell her story, if only to herself.” That theme recurs often in “Leaving a Trace” – – the way keeping a journal or diary leads to the understanding of one's life.

Journal writers, even those who content themselves with modest efforts, almost invariably learn more about themselves than they thought possible.

The author Gail Godwin puts if this way: 'During the act of writing, I have told myself something that I didn't know I knew.” The British writer Katherine Mansfield knowingly understated the case, “It's very strange, but the mere act of writing anything is a help.”

As Alexandra Johnson's title suggests, she finds in most journal writers the desire to leave behind some relic of their having lived. Though by no means always conscious, this desire for a certain kind of immortality drives them to bequeath traces of themselves.

Journals and diaries begun or continued in later life have special value. I strongly recommend this kind of writing to people of any age; to those who have reached mature years, I judge it possibly worth even more . As a woman named Julia Houy says, “I am eighty-one. It helps me to age well.”

But many people feel intimidated about beginning. A frequent question that Alexandra Johnson hears is: “Who could possibly care about my life?” The first answer, of course, is “You.” The second is possibly “family members, friends, and a whole lot of other people.”

Though it often seems forbidding to begin, it pays off quickly. Since, as Alexandra Johnson says, “at their core, journals are about sharpening consciousness,” they help us get more value from our lives.

Part of my motivation in keeping journals is to gift family members and friends with a better knowledge of who I am. After my great leave taking at the end of life, I want my daughter( and, possibly, her descendants) to discover some day, if she wants to, the experiences that shaped my personality.

That day of her taking a deeper interest in my life will come, I feel sure. For many years I have regretted not having such a document from my own father. Though not everyone has interest in developing a journal further, Johnson emphasizes how it is a fine take-off point for a memoir.

For professional writers keeping some form of journal or diary is probably a must. Alexandra Johnson's experience is instructive: “In dry seasons, all I have to do is open an old journal.”

If you want to make your later life more rewarding, here's a sure-fire way to make it happen – – keep a journal.

Richard Griffin