The Project of a Lifetime: My Journals
Since completing the writing and publishing of Room 732, people often ask me what I will write next. At first, I thought I might jump right in and get started on another book. I have the concept for it all ready to go. In fact, it has been percolating for years.
Then one day two weeks ago as I was walking along the beach, it occurred to me that I want to work on my writing project, which I began eight years ago but put on hold to write Room 732. My thoughts immediately began to drift off to my journals. I knew that that’s where my attention needed to be focused.
Aside from the diaries which I kept as a teenager and which accidentally were thrown out in a move long ago, I had not written in journals until 1974. Ever since I started again, I haven’t stopped.
In 1986, I began to question why I was filling journals at such a rapid pace, what I would do with them someday, and what my journal writing meant. No matter how much I pondered these questions, I steadily continued to commit my thoughts, feelings, and experiences onto the blank pages of one journal after another.
As I approached turning fifty, I decided to go back and read some of my journals. I left home for three months, rented a studio apartment on Hollywood Beach, and began to review my life as I extracted excerpts from about thirty-two volumes. These ended up compiled into a book entitled A Necklace of Pearls, which I shared with others but never published.
On my sixtieth birthday in my 298th journal, I wrote the following: I want to tackle my journal project again and make it a priority. It’s something that looms ahead and will until I make a concerted effort to get started. I think the reason I haven’t is because it feels overwhelming. By doing it, though, I will gain insight and wisdom as well as a perspective on my life that I might not have had before.
I thought I would start this project at the age of sixty-five, but since it is so huge, I shouldn’t wait to get started–and so I will begin. My journals are my life’s work.
I worked steadily at this for the next seven years, taking excerpts in approximately fifty different topics, such as parenting, marriage, the beach, spirituality, work, people I know, who I am, etc. I completed culling through 190 volumes and stopped when I began writing Room 732.
I have now resumed this daunting project knowing that there are approximately 160 journals left to read. As I sit here revisiting my life, I am struck by the tremendous amount I have committed to paper and the incredible gift I have given myself by doing so.
Synchronicity plays a huge role in all of this. Just last week, I picked up a volume that I had written many years ago when my close friend had gone to Vanderbilt for a bone marrow transplant. I spent four days at her bedside while she was recuperating from this difficult procedure which she hoped would save her life. While she slept on and off, I wrote and finished an entire journal.
Unfortunately, months later she passed away. I am left with a detailed record of our meaningful and intense conversations as well as my thoughts and feelings during those days at her bedside. They came flooding back as I read the pages in that journal.
The day after I finished taking excerpts from that volume, I called Temple Sinai, my synagogue, to reserve a room for my next “Living and Leaving Your Legacy” class that I plan to teach in the fall. As I was talking to Susan, the temple administrator, she mentioned that she had just received a letter from someone referring to the bone marrow screening the synagogue had done a few years ago. She explained that while it didn’t end up saving the life of the man for whom they were hoping to find a matching donor, just last week a match from the screening had been found for an eight-month-old child. Chills ran through my body at that news.
Susan told me that they are planning to organize another bone marrow screening in the fall. She then asked if I would be willing to help. It was one of those serendipitous moments. What were the chances that I would have just experienced remembering back to my dear friend and her bone marrow transplant? How could I say no?
It is times like this one when I know that taking excerpts from my journals is exactly what I need to be doing. Where it will take me is unknown in this moment. Yet, while I’m clear that I wrote these journals for me alone, what I know now is that someday in some form, they will be my legacy for my loved ones.
Then one day two weeks ago as I was walking along the beach, it occurred to me that I want to work on my writing project, which I began eight years ago but put on hold to write Room 732. My thoughts immediately began to drift off to my journals. I knew that that’s where my attention needed to be focused.
Aside from the diaries which I kept as a teenager and which accidentally were thrown out in a move long ago, I had not written in journals until 1974. Ever since I started again, I haven’t stopped.
In 1986, I began to question why I was filling journals at such a rapid pace, what I would do with them someday, and what my journal writing meant. No matter how much I pondered these questions, I steadily continued to commit my thoughts, feelings, and experiences onto the blank pages of one journal after another.
As I approached turning fifty, I decided to go back and read some of my journals. I left home for three months, rented a studio apartment on Hollywood Beach, and began to review my life as I extracted excerpts from about thirty-two volumes. These ended up compiled into a book entitled A Necklace of Pearls, which I shared with others but never published.
On my sixtieth birthday in my 298th journal, I wrote the following: I want to tackle my journal project again and make it a priority. It’s something that looms ahead and will until I make a concerted effort to get started. I think the reason I haven’t is because it feels overwhelming. By doing it, though, I will gain insight and wisdom as well as a perspective on my life that I might not have had before.
I thought I would start this project at the age of sixty-five, but since it is so huge, I shouldn’t wait to get started–and so I will begin. My journals are my life’s work.
I worked steadily at this for the next seven years, taking excerpts in approximately fifty different topics, such as parenting, marriage, the beach, spirituality, work, people I know, who I am, etc. I completed culling through 190 volumes and stopped when I began writing Room 732.
I have now resumed this daunting project knowing that there are approximately 160 journals left to read. As I sit here revisiting my life, I am struck by the tremendous amount I have committed to paper and the incredible gift I have given myself by doing so.
Synchronicity plays a huge role in all of this. Just last week, I picked up a volume that I had written many years ago when my close friend had gone to Vanderbilt for a bone marrow transplant. I spent four days at her bedside while she was recuperating from this difficult procedure which she hoped would save her life. While she slept on and off, I wrote and finished an entire journal.
Unfortunately, months later she passed away. I am left with a detailed record of our meaningful and intense conversations as well as my thoughts and feelings during those days at her bedside. They came flooding back as I read the pages in that journal.
The day after I finished taking excerpts from that volume, I called Temple Sinai, my synagogue, to reserve a room for my next “Living and Leaving Your Legacy” class that I plan to teach in the fall. As I was talking to Susan, the temple administrator, she mentioned that she had just received a letter from someone referring to the bone marrow screening the synagogue had done a few years ago. She explained that while it didn’t end up saving the life of the man for whom they were hoping to find a matching donor, just last week a match from the screening had been found for an eight-month-old child. Chills ran through my body at that news.
Susan told me that they are planning to organize another bone marrow screening in the fall. She then asked if I would be willing to help. It was one of those serendipitous moments. What were the chances that I would have just experienced remembering back to my dear friend and her bone marrow transplant? How could I say no?
It is times like this one when I know that taking excerpts from my journals is exactly what I need to be doing. Where it will take me is unknown in this moment. Yet, while I’m clear that I wrote these journals for me alone, what I know now is that someday in some form, they will be my legacy for my loved ones.
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