Is it just me or does your body sometimes arrive at your destination before your mind does? You know, you’re at the beach, but your mind is running through checklists...did I pack everything, did I answer my emails, did I switch the stove off?

I’ve noticed this often happens to me. Most often when I fly somewhere. Less so when I do a road trip. Apparently on road trips my brain and body travel at the same speed. 😉 

This happened the first time I flew to Paris. There I was, green, nineteen and in Paris!

Getting on that plane was one of the best decisions of my life and I followed it up with another great decision soon afterwards.

I had been so focused on getting there - working and saving - that I wasn’t really sure what to do once I got there. To my dad’s horror, on his enquiry (days before I left my home town) “what is your itinerary?” I responded, “I arrive in Paris at noon”. That was as far as I had thought!

I needed to transition from my work all the time mentality. My body was in Paris but my mind was still in work mode and my heart was stuck on all the farewells that preceded my flight.

Ideally, it would have been great to talk to a friend, but I was travelling alone, didn’t know anybody and had just enough French to order a meal - the same one, over and over again.

The conversations I wanted to have with someone were floating around in my head. Impulsively, I spent some of my hard-earned savings on a small notebook. Talking to yourself isn’t socially acceptable but writing to yourself is!

The thoughts flying around my head landed on those pages. They were quickly followed by what I was seeing, who I was meeting, a million new experiences, my feelings, what I was learning and what I was trying to figure out. 

There was so much I was experiencing and seeing on a daily basis that it was hard to keep up with my need to write.  

When you’re backpacking like I was, time can feel elastic. I would spend a day sightseeing with someone that I just met that morning, and yet it felt like we shared a lifetime together. 

It was as if the volume had been turned up on life! My pen skated across pages trying to record every moment, feeling, sight.

I get my love of writing from my mother. She was a great letter writer. 

Envelopes would arrive stuffed, straining at their glue seams to contain the pages, photos and newspaper clippings. Receiving a letter from her was like receiving a deconstructed scrapbook.

The envelope was often an example of written crown shyness where she would leave just a small channel-like gap between the address and everything else she had to say on the envelope. “Love you”, “miss you”, “write soon” stickers and other decorations colouring the envelope like a wordy decorative creeper.

The pages were crammed full of words - two sentences to each line. Borders were ignored - she used all the space fully. 

One of my mother’s pet hates was when people didn’t butter toast right to the edge. She thought it was miserly. “Don’t you have enough butter to include the edges?” 

She took that same approach when writing on a page - she had enough words to cover the margins, borders and every bit of available blank space. 

I had so much to share about my travels that I was constantly writing to family and friends about my experiences. Letters, postcards and aerogrammes. (You may have to look that last one up. Actually, you may have to look all of them up!) But there was also some stuff just for me; that’s where my journals came in.

In my missives, to family and friends, I was sharing mostly what was happening in my external world. In my notebooks, I explored my internal world.

The habit that started one month and two days after my nineteenth birthday stuck. Thirty-three years later, I still journal - regularly. I call it my emotional exfoliation.

Except for a two-year radio silence during my first marriage, I’ve continued with the practice, not always daily, but mostly weekly.

I type faster than I write so, at one point, I experimented with typing instead of writing by hand. But part of the process, ritual and experience was lost for me. 

My thoughts like to meander from my mind down my arm into my hand to pop out in ink at the end of a pen. Sometimes they run and bunch at my wrist. Then they flop, splotch and land with the elegance of a plumber snaking a blocked sewer pipe. 

It used to frustrate me that my words and thoughts weren’t beautiful and perfectly formed. Now I know it’s the process of letting them go, letting them flow, that brings me back.

I start each entry with what I refer to as triangulation - as in triangulating my position. Where I am in the world, where I am in my life and or where I am in the week. When I backpacked the three triangulation points were date, country and city/town. Now it is date, day and time.

I love points, numbers and lists. I often start sentences with “firstly”. When I’m writing it’s easy to keep track of what number I’m on. Not so easy for me in conversation. A long-running joke between my husband and me is to move from “firstly” to “b” and “on the third hand”. The other day I capitulated. Walking out to the patio table, where he sat, I said, “Firstly, I need to stop enumerating.” 🙂

Some days I just dive straight into writing - especially if the time says 3 or 4 am. Other days I set the scene. What table am I writing at? Are my dogs providing a soundtrack of snores? Am I enjoying a cocktail on a hot highveld afternoon or caressing a cup of tea on a chilly morning? I describe where I’m at physically before talking about where I’m at mentally and emotionally.

Have you ever had a to-do list running so noisily through your mind that you can’t sleep? So you get up and write it down or add it to your digital app so that you can get some rest? That’s how journaling works for me.

It allows me to empty the thoughts and feelings running around and crashing into each other inside me. If I don’t let them out it’s like I’m trying to live my life while a children’s party is going on in my head. A children’s party where loads of sugar has been served.

I don’t know about you but my thoughts and feelings don’t look like neat lines of code. I’ve compared mine to a bowl of fish hooks; difficult to pick up one because most of the bowl’s contents come with it. But the sooner I start the quicker the bowl is emptied.

Essentially whenever I write I’m answering the question that Joey of Friends’ fame loved to pose: how ya doin’? How am I doing? What’s happening with me? What am I happy about? What am I not happy about? Why is that? Let’s explore that a little further shall we?

Basically, it’s a variation of the classic therapists’ question: and how does that make you feel? It’s self-therapy.

What keeps me coming back is that it works. The more I probe the greater insight I gain. 

Socrates declared "The unexamined life is not worth living". For me, the examination makes my life better. I understand myself, my worth, my purpose more because I scrutinise and investigate to gain self-understanding.

You know how when something’s bugging you, and you meet a friend for a drink or coffee and as you talk about the pebble in your emotional shoe you work it out? You gain clarity. That’s it! I just save myself buying a friend coffee. 😀

My diary is my sounding board and it’s always available to me. I don’t have to put anything off or wait for an appointment. 2 am? No problem, give me pen and paper I need to figure this out now.  

I need to give voice to my thoughts and feelings. I need to give them space to roam, buck, cavort, roll around and ground.

I have literally filled books in my efforts to try and figure out my relationships with others in my life until I realised that the most important relationship I’ll ever have is the one I have with myself. 

Keeping a diary, journaling, whatever you want to call it is now time I spend with myself. It’s essential me time. It’s my internal spa day, workout, therapy session and chill time.

Taking care of my relationship with myself improves my relationship with others.

A few weeks back I joked with a friend that if I didn’t journal I think I’d end up writing on the walls. Only to remember that I actually have written on all the doors in my home!

Part of our sabbatical was spent sorting through our internal clutter. Sometimes it was easier to clear external untidiness. One day I decided I should throw out all my journals. 

My husband was horrified and urged me to enter a pact with him that I would first read through a year of journals. He said if, after that, I still felt I wanted to throw them out he’d help me burn them in the backyard.

I selected a year at random and started reading. 

What a delightful experience! It was like visiting with myself! I laughed, cried and cheered my younger self on. Often exclaiming: yes! There! You’ve got it! She was sifting through the silt but I could see the nuggets of gold.

Instead of reading one year, I read 10! The decade that led up to and ended with the end of my first foray into marriage.

Fuck! It was fun visiting with the person that was me then. I gained a whole new perspective of myself. I was reading about my past through the eyes of the young woman that lived it. She was just all over the page - wit, humour, intelligence, strength, seeking. I rolled around those pages like a cat in catnip.

But here’s what surprised me. I realised that deep down I had held her responsible for getting me into the relationship that would be my first marriage. Somewhere inside me, I expected her to do better even though she didn’t know better.

But as I laughed and cheered her on I realised our connection was stronger than ever. She’d survive, she’d thrive and there wasn’t a thing about her that I wanted to change. If it wasn’t for the path she’d taken I wouldn’t end up where I was and who I was. She got me through one of the hardest parts. 

I no longer blamed her. There was nothing to blame, it was a moment, part of a story, part of becoming. Our stories need dark forests and tragedy as much as they need love stories and comedies. A good story interweaves tragedy and comedy just as a good painting plays with light and dark.

My journaling started with a physical journey but it was this journey to my past that brought to my awareness the important role that journaling has played in my life. I had for years treated it as a compulsion but I didn’t value or acknowledge the incredible contribution it’s made to my life.

Now that I know this I cherish, not only the physical journals but also the ritual of the writing. The space to luxuriate in my own thoughts and meditate on my life. Emptying the clamour of thoughts creates mental space. Flushing the flow of feelings provides me with emotional capacity.

My journals not only tell me where I’ve been, but they’ve also brought me back to myself. 

One of the reasons for that two-year radio silence was that I had lost my voice, I had lost myself - there was no one to transmit to. 

When I was most fearful that my spirit would not survive I returned to those frayed notebooks and reminded myself that I hadn’t always been mute. I read my words to myself, like a chant,  a conjuration to bring myself back from the brink.

Less than two decades later, as I pored over those pages,  I saw my voice reappear, a triangulation, a blip on the screen that says I’m here, here I am, can you hear me?

A few days after I left my first husband a friend arrived at my doorstep with a bottle of wine, big smile and an even bigger hug. We opened the bottle and the tears, laughs and conversation flowed. So much so that she only left the next morning as the sun was rising.

I prepared myself and fell into bed, exhausted. In the quiet, I heard a deep thumping beat. I kept my eyes closed, waiting for sleep. Then words joined the thump like a knock on a door. The words started to knock furiously and the beat crescendoed. I was not going to get any sleep.

I jumped out of bed and scrambled through unopened boxes until I clutched pen and paper. The words roared out of my pen. I wrote feverishly as poems tumbled out of me. Thoughts, stories, gushed out in rhyme like a rave for one.

Hours later the rhythm ended and I collapsed into bed. Pen and book still open next to me; ready, waiting.

So much has been written about the struggle of writing. And it is. In many, many ways it has taken me 52 years to write this. But, there are moments when the gossamer wings of time stutters and I catch a glimpse of the rainbow threads that veil our perception of time and space.

Sometimes, when I am trying to organise the words into sensical sentences, I pace. I often write at my dining room table and figure-eight pace around the dining room table then into my lounge and around the coffee table. 

One day, some years ago now, as I stepped through the dining room portal it felt like I stepped into another dimension. I was still standing on the floor in my home but the walls had expanded, and I was surrounded by women who came before me. They appeared as flickering wisps of cosmos; like portable tails of Hailey’s comet. 

They reached out to touch and greet me, acknowledge me. There was such joy, exuberance. I felt like they were cheering me on. Then they fell back to make space for the oldest of them to come forward. She was so old that she no longer remembered her name. But her essence was strong, beautiful, gentle.

Elizabeth Gilbert gives a goosebump-inducing TEDx talk about her research into how the muse, genius, the creative spirit has been viewed, interpreted and experienced by artists over human history. She also reveals the origins of the chant “olé, olé, olé” and how this started as an acknowledgement of people being touched by God, or gods if you like.

Neil deGrasse Tyson says 'We are stardust brought to life by the universe so that the universe can figure itself out. We are made of the elements created in the fires burning at the heart of stars and share these elements as other planets, asteroids and other bodies in this universe.” 

So much of what I write is dust but there’s a yearning, a call of my spirit, that is seeking out the stardust, the magic of the universe that resides in me. That resides in you.

It’s an exploration of my internal universe, my connection to the cosmos, the flicker of stardust that surrounds us and force that unites us.

I encourage you to explore yours.

If what I share adds some benefit to your life or touches you please hit a like button, subscribe, share or comment.