A Journey of Self-Discovery

I saw a woodgrain journal at the bookstore last weekend and fell in love with it immediately. I couldn’t resist the temptation to buy it, especially with encouragement from my friend who was with me at that time.

I have lost count of the number of journals that I have. Everytime when I go to the bookstores or stationery shops, I will always browse through the section that sells the journals. As a result, I have collected a number of them – I bought most of them and a few were given to me as Christmas presents.

I must confess that for some reasons I have a soft spot for these journals. When I was a little child, I love to collect these journals but of course, the design of the journals then was a lot simpler and it costs only a fraction of today’s price.

What do I use these journals for?

When I was much younger, I used them to capture the quotations that I came across or new words that I learnt. Occasionally, I would write journal – to capture the happenings in the day or my thoughts and reflections. Then I stopped using them to capture quotations as quotations were subsequently available in printed books (and I ended up collected different quotation books). I still wrote journal then, but less frequent. It was only in the recent years that I picked up the habit of writing journals again.

I was inspired by James, one of my ex-colleagues. He used to carry his journal everywhere he went, and he captured everything in his journal, be it official notes or just his thoughts. I recalled he shared with us his journey in journaling and how journaling had helped him. At that time, I was also attending a programme where our “teacher” encouraged us to cultivate the habit of reflection and keeping track of our thoughts, as part of our self-discovery journey. So I started writing journal on and off since then.

Now that I have written journals for a few years, I realised that journaling could be quite therapeutic which in turn help me to exercise more self-control. So it is not surprising that when I read my past journal not, I noticed I had written a lot more when I was down.

The process of journaling helps to stimulate my mind, body and heart, allows me to capture my thoughts, forces me to reflect, examines my beliefs, checks my emotion, etc. As a result, I am able to understand myself better, have better clarity of who I am, where I came from and where am I heading.

It has been a enriching self-discovery journey since I started journaling.