I'm ready to return to regular journaling. Writing helps overcome many shortcomings of memory: I've been unable to maintain the same pace of personal growth without it. I'm also influenced by Graydon Hoare's post, always bet on text.
Not only in space, but also in time. Imagine trying to navigate a maze with mapping supplies, but as time passes, the oldest sections disappear. It's hard to make progress when you can't remember where you've been.
I also find myself easily distracted. It's incredibly difficult to follow a single line of reasoning for extended periods of time, when all it takes is one notification or wayward thought to scatter a carefully structured tower of ideas.
Recording these ideas in writing gives us a foundation to rebuild from. A checkpoint, if you will, from which we can restore our mental state: conclusions and the trails of reasoning behind them. And also a beacon of focus that we can continually re-center on. Consider the power of paper when doing math homework, where we go from struggling to add large numbers to performing complex symbolic manipulations.
All in all, I think writing is the best way to equip ourselves to grapple with tough questions (e.g. what do I want? what do I believe?). The iterative nature of writing, reading, and revising is engaging in a way that pure, abstract thinking is not, and leaves a permanent artifact that anyone can replay.
Our brains are pretty terrible as far as long-term storage options go. Not only do we forget things, we sometimes even fabricate information without knowing. Offloading experiences and ideas into more reliable media, like text or images, preserves both completeness and correctness. These in turn enable other things, like reminiscing or tracking growth.
This post took me two hours to write, but it probably took you less than ten minutes to read. As we continue to grow up, we'll have even less time to catch up with each other, so being able to share a condensed and heavily revised document to establish a baseline understanding is really nice. You get the benefit of (hopefully) coherent thoughts without having to sit and watch me think through everything.
And while I'm aware that "heavily revised" could be read as "inauthentic", the intent is to only become more precise while maintaining accuracy. Which is also interesting sometimes, because writing down what I believe can feel both normative and descriptive, and it's not always clear if I'm writing down how I think or how I wish to think. But I guess that's another topic.
Overall, I think it's important to me to establish some kind of overarching personal narrative. To understand who I am, what I want, and how to get there. Church has always been a place where I'm challenged to reflect on these things, but I hope that journaling will make those reflections more concrete.