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Photo by David Iskander on Unsplash
A couple of weeks ago, I announced the start of the American Heirloom Project and said I’d provide some actionable advice on how you can be part of this. The details are there on what this is about.
This time, we’re going to start on what to do, and the easiest place to start is with a journal.
In this case, we’re talking about something akin to a diary but with introspection about what you’ve seen, read, or experienced. In it, you talk a bit about your daily life, about interesting technology, interesting events, or really anything that stands out that you want to reflect on.
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It needs to be done either every day or damn close.
Why? Because history is written not so much by the winners, but by writers. Sure, the forces of evil might sweep good and decency away, push any mention of the past underground, and pretend it never happened, but every person who kept a journal, who documented what happened before and after, is a link to the truth.
“But I’m not that interesting,” you might think, but I assure you that you are.
Anne Frank wasn’t particularly interesting when she started writing in her diary, was she? She was a little Jewish girl who was just trying to pass the time as her family hid from the Nazis, but she was hardly unique in hiding.
Yet her diary is a link to what it was like to be in those shoes, and it’s one of the few first-hand accounts written at the time things were happening.
Even if you’re not part of big events like the Holocaust—we all should hope no one is part of anything like that ever again—what your life is like on a daily basis is something that someone will find fascinating. Your descendants might, for one, but even historians of the future might look at your journals as a valuable resource about what the 21st century is actually like.
I’m a history buff, and you’d be amazed at how little we understand about everyday life in so many periods of history. We might know what looks like a lot, but we don’t know what people of that era thought about the state of their lives, how they adapted to difficulties, what some of those difficulties might have been beyond the big historical events, and so on. That knowledge is lost forever.
Yet, if enough people start writing all of this down, saving it for future generations, passing it down through the family while emphasizing the importance of both history and physical media, then maybe we can change that.
Especially as we may be entering a dark era of American history.
So, now that I’ve explained why I consider a journal such a part of the American Heirloom Project, let me share my thoughts on what a journal should be physically.
In essence, it’s a notebook, but I encourage you to avoid spiral-bound notebooks entirely for journal use. Anything that can be easily modified, like tearing out “inconvenient” pages, should be avoided. The fact that some of those pages might tear out by accident makes it all the more pressing to avoid such products.
Instead, look for something where the pages are sewn in. The old-school composition books you might remember from your days as a student are more in line with what I’m talking about here. I had a science teacher who insisted on those kinds of books because, while writing about experiments, we couldn’t remove pages, and it would serve as a kind of log.
However, those kinds of notebooks have a large footprint and really not all that many pages. Amazon is filled with “journals” made by different companies. The Moleskine is a common “luxury” brand of notebook, in part because it’s made to a similar standard. You don’t have to spend that kind of money, though. Just make sure it’s sewn and acid-free.
Next, don’t use erasable ink. Just line out your mistakes and keep writing. Erasable means it can be modified, either by you or someone else, and that’s no bueno.
In short, you need to treat this like it’s going to be archived for posterity, like you’re the President of the United States and know that this is your legacy, because to a great degree, it is.
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Obviously, you’re free men and women and can do what you want, but I think you’ll find that actually writing about your life, your thoughts, and your feelings about the world will be enjoyable, on top of setting the stage for preserving history as it actually happened, not what someone a hundred years from now tries to claim happened.
Even if there’s nothing sketchy going on down the road, you can still leave a glimpse of life for future historians, your great-grandchildren, or whoever else.
And, at the absolute worst, you have a chance to work through some of your thoughts on the day.
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