Note to Self

A Deep Breath, When You Reach the Last Page of Your Journal

That sounds more final than it was meant to

Some people talk to God, and some find themselves on a psychiatrist’s couch. Some look for answers at the bottom of a bottle, some have a carry-on with the voices inside their head.

Whatever gets you through the night, also sprach John Lennon.

In whichever way it is that people conduct their internal monologue, we can be sure that each person that sits down with a journal has their own rationale and modus operandi.

It wouldn’t be difficult to turn into a listicle if I was so inclined, but I won’t do that. There are probably plenty of those on the benefits of keeping a journal, as it is. It will have to suffice to say for me, it is a way to organize my thoughts and by extension my life. Really, it is to make sense of the way I narrate it to myself. Or maybe it’s to narrate the way I make sense of it.

Either way, it involves stopping for a minute and taking a breath, maybe looking down at my own little empire from above.

Perhaps it is to record it all for posterity’s sake, though it’s rare that I go back and re-read anything beyond a snippet. Occasionally it has been useful to be able to go back and see if the way that I remember something from years ago, is actually the way it happened.

That’s called the mythology of your life and if you ever want to take a few whacks at the edifice of the way you see yourself, then I highly recommend it now and again. But if you’d prefer to keep that screenplay gloriously intact, it’s probably best to leave those previous books in which you scribbled your screed years ago, in that box with the others on the top shelf of the closet.

There is always the possibility that someone will discover these when I am long gone. I hope not, but I do hope that if they read them, they will be convinced, like I am, that if I can fill a book in just over a year with everything that went down, then I must be doing something right.

Maybe it’s just the evidence of a life well lived. That’s what I’ll tell myself.

But at some point, no matter how frequently you write in your little book, or how small you make your handwriting is, one thing is inevitable. You will run out of pages.

I have currently arrived at that point, yet again, just over fourteen months after having written the first page. It was pristine, that clean, white page and that unbesmirched cover. It hadn’t yet seen the bottom of a book bag. It had no idea what I would put it through, nor did it know how often I would press it into immediate service, a receptacle for things that just had to be written down.

Life happened before that first page — and is richly documented in its predecessor — and it will continue after the last page. Naturally, its successor is ready to go and has been for some time.

It happens then, that the finishing of a particular journal is nothing, if not an opportunity to stop, take a breath, and take stock. The sort of thing one is supposed to do at New Year’s and birthdays, rather than on some random day in the middle of June.

What strikes me this time is how different everything was fourteen months ago and how I could never have imagined everything that occurred that led to my existence in the present moment. How did I get here?

The thought then necessarily occurs that as I begin a new, fresh, clean one, I can have no way of knowing what it will all look like fourteen months from now, when that one reaches its logical conclusion. How will I get there?

It really is an accumulation of tiny, nearly imperceptible, daily decisions that come together like stardust and combine to form the Big Bang of our lives and set us down in a present reality that will surely be as different tomorrow as it is a year from now.

In April 2022, I was living in Kingston, Jamaica, quite happily I might add. I had stepped away from a teaching career and was lucky to be living a comfortable expat life in the Caribbean and still just getting going with this whole Medium experiment.

I was in Guatemala City when I began that book, about to embark on a three-week, 200-hour yoga teaching training course on the shores of Lake Atitlan in Guatemala.

Fourteen months later, I am a world away from all of it — in all possible senses of the phrase. And I can’t help but look back in wonder at how different everything was for me then, compared to now. Not better, not worse, just different.

The day after next, or whenever I do get to the last page, will not really be the beginning or end of anything. It’ll just be another day on the continuum.

And yet, I will quite literally turn the page, keep talking to myself and start a new book after that.