"An unexamined life is not worth living" - Socrates
Warning: horrible handwriting haha :3
The Art of Journaling
Self-Awareness
The act of diving into your own mind as you find for a concise and honest answer to answer your question and to express yourself with your own self being your own limitations.
Self-awareness in journaling for me is like imagining yourself staring at a mirror in which shows a part of myself all throughout the years of my life which I've lived through, and taking down every detail pertaining to the past and pondering if a variable of that particular past of yourself would be ever so slightly different, how would it affect the current state of yourself?
And when it comes to the future, we only then have to build our predictions of ourselves of it based on the "resources" we have in our current state.
Mind Scratcher
Waking up in the morning and answering a question each day for a year, you would end up not only answering 365 questions but also being able to formulate and sort out cluttered ideas inside your mind to create a decisive answer efficiently.
And in person this will take in effect as you are able to provide a service in which you answer questions not just for yourself but maybe for others. Answering questions in your journal also enhances your brain activity and makes it better over time like a muscle. In a sense that the impulses in our brain gets better and better to do what it's supposed to do.
In my case, I see it as fun and is also parallel to the idea of leading you to more self-awareness, in a sense that it really does exercise your brain which unlocks more about how you process information, perceive yourself, and your surroundings.
Journaling Style?
To describe my journal style in 4 words its:
- Free-form like water
- Honest without fabrication
- Expressive without limitations
- Simple yet effective
The 3 Essentials of My Journals
I have important items while I do my journals, it gets me familiar and comforted as I start journaling in that specific date. Though the session may be short, after journaling, these essentials will still be useful to me when I'll be reading my books.
The Notebook
The notebook itself is what will be put first on top of the table. I skim through my past answers first as I then prepare in advance a new question for an upcoming day which I answer it.
The Fountain Pen
This fountain pen actually was my wish gift during my school's christmas party. It has been a great investment as I've rarely used it outside of my journal notebook since. And it's also from my favorite brand of school supplies, Pilot.
The Headphones
Noise-cancelling headphones, modified the sound configurations in it's application settings to make the sounds more "crispy", specifically classical music. I do this as well when doing other important tasks on my agenda but when I want to calm down, this is what I usually put up.
Source of Questions
Now some of the questions are actually from my own random thoughts. But most of them are actually from the web which have journal prompt generators. This is the one I'm currently using.
A few of my entries
