Journey Journal Completion

     This past week I finished my Journey Journal assignment. It had a duration of eight weeks and it consisted of forty entries (five per week), and twenty four life compasses (three per week). I had to write whatever came to mind during ten minutes while following the five anti-rules which were: keep your hand moving, don't cross out, don't worry about spelling, punctuation or grammar, lose control, don't think don't get logical, and go for the jugular. The objective of this journal was to help us, the students, reflect and learn more about our internal journeys.

 

     At the beginning, some of the anti-rules were difficult for me to follow. When I first started writing I would get logical because I am used to writing about specific subjects and not about whatever comes to mind; as I realized that I would stop moving my hand and then my mind would go blank. Also, being the perfectionist that I am, it was hard not to cross out words because I had misspelled them. Nevertheless, after the first few entries I started getting the hang of things and my writing process improved. My thoughts became more continuous and fluent, therefore I didn’t stop moving my hand. Moreover, as the weeks went on I realized that, for the most part, I was actually enjoying the whole writing process. My mood definitely influenced how I felt about it; most days I looked forward to writing, others not so much. There were times that going for the jugular was easy, whereas occasionally it was not. For me it is riveting to see how one’s mind-set can affect the writing process.

     On the other hand, the life compasses were fun to do. A life compass consisted of a circle with a swirl in the middle to represent that it’s ever-changing, and its four categories were: spiritual, mental, emotional and physical. In each one you could put 1-3 depending on how you were feeling and then you had to write why you put that certain number. The bar graph below represents the numbers of all my life compasses.

 

     In the graph above we can see that in twenty one of the twenty four life compasses I had a total number of eight through twelve, and only in three I had a total number of six through seven. Evidently, the average numbers show that in general I am a content person who feels she is in a good place, most of the time.

     In short, I started this whole Journey Journal thinking that it was going to be horrible and that I was not going to like it. However, I was wrong because as time went on I started to realize that I actually enjoyed it. One of the things I learned is that I should be more open to trying out new things such as writing; even if I think I won’t like it because you’ll never really know until you try it, and when you do you might even surprise yourself. Furthermore, a thing that I already knew about myself but saw reflected in the life compasses is that I’m a happy human being. Lastly, what I hope to take away from all of this is the daily habit of sitting down to write whatever I’m feeling and thinking as a way to keep track of my lifelong internal journey.