Creatives keep journals

January 26, 2019 Will Simpson

I either know I'm ignorant or I have no idea I'm ignorant

Write in a journal to guide and you test your reflections.

In doing so you shape yourself into a mature, intellectual craftsman. This is indispensable to originality in any intellectual pursuit. This is a huge confidence builder, one becomes confident in one’s uncertainty. The more one learns the more one becomes intimate with their ignorance. Journaling also helps you build up the habit of writing.

The intellectual craftsman should keep a special file for his master agenda. Rewrite and review by himself and perhaps discussed with some like minded friends. Review carefully when relaxed.

May Sarton writes about how writing creates a soul via building a self, and opus. Sound mystical and a very poetic but is another way of saying writing builds knowledge.

Thus, every man, in the course of his life, must not only show himself obedient and docile. By his fidelity he must build—starting with the most natural territory of his own self—a work, an opus, into which something enters from all the elements of the earth. He makes his own soul throughout his earthly days; and at the same time he collaborates in another work, in another opus, which infinitely transcends, while at the same time it narrowly determines, the perspectives of his individual achievement: the completing of the world. It is only when we can believe that we are creating the soul that life has any meaning, but when we can believe it—and I do and always have—then there is nothing we do that is without meaning and nothing that we suffer that does not hold the seed of creation in it.

May Sarton -- Journal of a Solitude

Hope you have an awesome day!

Credits — May Sarton
Credits — C. Wright Mills The Social Imagination

This journal is meant as a reminder to encourage my future self. Where I work on my mental fitness and ‘adulting’. A reminder to him to operate in the world with love and compassion and some tips put together in a moment of clarity to help him when he is less clear and caught up in stuff the he can’t control. Continue the conversation anytime: will@kestrelcreek.com.