Journaling the moments or savoring them?

Since I was 25, I’ve journaled. Eight of my most important journal entries became blogs and eventually seven of those eight formed the seven chapters of my book I published in 2018. And since then, I’ve continued to write in various formats. Why? I want to capture the moments, the feelings, the thoughts, the actions…the things I’ve done. If we don’t capture our stories, what will we have but material things to pass to future generations?

Of course, documenting too much can be futile. As one Economist reader wrote in response to an article about journaling, if you wrote about everything you did, you’d find yourself writing about writing and end up in a downward spiral where you did nothing but write about writing.

What’s the balance?

As I’m now the parent of two children, I ask myself these questions: How much should I be writing about what they do and how they do it? Am I capturing enough? Will it matter to them? Will it matter to me later in life?

I ask these questions because of my greatest fear: the inability to think on my own; the losing of my own mind (through dementia or some other late-age brain condition). If I don’t capture the memories and write them down, will I forget them? I don’t want to forget. I want to remember. I want to remember everything. But I know I can’t. Even if I did write it all down, I’d spend too much time writing and not enough time living.

Every day, when I pick up my kids from school, each child, upon seeing me, runs to me and gives me a hug. I don’t know how long they’ll do that in life, and I know there is a period of time, a significant period perhaps, where they won’t at all. Each time this happens, I try to savor it as much as I can. And while I don’t write about it each time it happens, at least I’ll know that, in the end, the only thing I’ll need to remember is that I savored the moments I did have with them. And in the end, no matter how much I write, that will be the only thing that matters.