Think Tank Tuesday

Today's Think Tank Tuesday is all about journaling. I'm personally not a huge fan of journaling, but  I am finding that it is a necessity. I won't live forever and I won't remember every place I have visited in my lifetime. There are already many that I have forgotten and without my photos would have no idea I was ever there! It's a good thing I take photos of signs when traveling as well. I'd really be up a creek without many of them.

So why journal? You can jot down dates and places and faces. We have hundreds of photos in our mountain of genealogy and we have no idea who most of those people are. We're guessing their family, but we have no idea if they're Great Aunt Tildy or Great Great Great Uncle Fred. Why? Because no one took the two seconds to write down who they were! Everyone probably just assumed that everyone would remember. Heck, there are people in my wedding photos who I have no idea who they are and that was only 16 years ago. I will need name tags for everyone in another 20 years! Probably one for myself as well.

People come and go from our lives. With journaling, you can write down so much more than a time, place, and face. You can write the story. Isn't the story why we scrapbook? If we weren't interested in the story, we could simply have photo albums stuffed to the gills on our bookshelves. Scrapbooks don't just hold photos; they tell our story. How we lived our life. Whether we were world travelers, annual Disney vacationers, gardeners, military families who move every few months, come from large or small families, have a house full of pets, built our own house and our homes, made your own clothes or quilts, went to prom and attended graduation (yay for making it!), were born, and most importantly that we LIVED.

Here's my CHALLENGE to you: Journal. Yes, really it's that simple. But do NOT use your computer and a pretty font to type it all up. Write it out with a pen or marker in YOUR hand writing! Hand writing is going way of the typewriter.

So many kids today don't learn cursive and it's an art that has been dying since I was a child. My great-grandmother taught handwriting way, way back when. My grandfather had the most beautiful handwriting. When I was a little girl, I would sit on his lap and ask him to write for me. His name was Earl Ezra and his E's were simply gorgeous. They had about a hundred loops and looked like calligraphy. I always wanted to learn how to write like him. I loved sitting in his lap and watching him wind up to write those loops.

Sounds like a silly memory, but it still fascinates me 30-something years later and I remember it like it was yesterday. He's gone now, but I have that amazing memory and I think of him every time I see handwriting. Little did I know that as a little girl that would have such an impact on me.

This is why handwriting your journaling my CHALLENGE to you. I CHALLENGE you to create a memory for someone in your life. It could be with one of your children or a sibling. Talk about your writing. My mother has nice handwriting. It's not as fancy as my grandfather's, but her handwriting looks like a script font as well. Somewhere along the way our society lost that. That saddens me because it's another lost art form. People took great pride in their handwriting abilities and nowadays we just type everything on a computer and print it out in one the tens of thousands of fonts we have accessible to us at a moment's notice.

You and I won't be here forever. But our memory can live on in something as simple as our handwriting. While we may not particularly care for our handwriting, it is ours and ours alone. It's unique to each of us!

Until next time *

Write. With a pen. Not with mechanical means.