Lessons I'm Going
To Teach My Kids
Too Late #91
I heard long ago that you should keep a journal. So I did, for a while, and then I stopped. I don’t remember why.
I thought about it sometimes as an adult, whenever I would hear about other people re-reading theirs. The childish dreaming, the teenage drama, the vows and promises and long-abandoned goals, all funny and entertaining and mortifying and sad.
I often thought I should start again, but never did. The idea of recording my adult ramblings just didn’t appeal. It would lack the innocence, the naïveté, and the vibrance of a child’s take on the world, their life at the moment, and what the future might be or what they want it to be.
And then, one day, I found my old journal, mixed in with some of my mom’s stuff when I was cleaning out her house. I recognized it immediately — the too-perfectly printed letters of a small child, the different shades of coloured pencil in an old-style lined-paper exercise book with my name neatly and proudly displayed across the cover. I sat down and opened it with eager hands.
Page after page of how much I hated everybody I knew. Every page, every entry, everybody.
I read it cover to cover, laughing at the pettiness of it, the ages-forgotten gripes and grudges, the childhood friends and acquaintances I hadn’t thought of in years. Then, to my great regret, I threw it away.
I can’t help but wonder — if I started a journal today, would it be any different? I hope so, but deep down, I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t.
I will definitely encourage my kids to keep journals. They can record for posterity their dreams and goals, air their grievances, write terrible poetry, and one day in the far future, get a glimpse of who they were and who they were fated to become.
And if they don’t like it, then they can just throw it away.
Lesson #91 —
Consider The Past And
You Shall Know The Future
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