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Some years ago I started writing down my reflections and, more importantly, returning to them later. The returning is where everything interesting happened. Problems that had once consumed me sat on the page in full urgency, and I had trouble remembering what the urgency was about. Opinions I no longer held were still there, argued with a confidence I recognized immediately because it was the same confidence I could feel in my current opinions.
Until then, I could tell a story about how I had changed. Everyone can. The pages gave me something to check that story against, and the story did not always survive the check.
You know you were different five years ago. That much is easy. Now try to remember what you expected from the years ahead, back before you knew how they would turn out. Which worry seemed certain to stay with you? What did you assume would matter by now? The honest answer is that you cannot fully get back there. What happened afterward keeps leaking into the memory, tidying it, making your past self a little wiser and a little more consistent with the person doing the remembering.
An old entry has no access to what happened afterward. It preserves what you wrote while the outcome was still unknown, and it may be unfair, overdramatic, or completely mistaken. Even that becomes useful. You can examine the reasoning you used at the time, including the parts you would now prefer to explain a little differently.
Underneath all the ordinary advice about journaling, this is the function I find most interesting. You are building a record that future versions of you can return to, with enough distance to see what was difficult to notice while you were living through it.
The Stoics took writing seriously for practical reasons. Cleanthes was said to have recorded Zeno’s lectures on oyster shells and ox shoulder blades because he could not afford ordinary writing materials. Centuries later, Epictetus urged his students to write down important thoughts and return to them regularly. An insight needed to remain available after the moment in which it first made sense.
Kept long enough, those pages can also reveal something less comfortable. You may find a promise from years ago that sounds almost exactly like one you made last week. Both were sincere. Reading them together raises a question that another fresh burst of determination cannot answer.
Marcus Aurelius kept returning to the same lessons in his own writing. Repetition can be part of learning to live by a principle, and it can also conceal how little we have changed. How do we tell which one we are doing?
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