At this point in my life I am travelling across the world - I am living away from my home country, Australia, with my Aunt and Uncle in the sunny ol’ Canada, and I have been travelling across Europe in the past month. To keep a record of the events that shape my travelling life I am keeping a diary. Not a diary of my thoughts and feelings, but merely a diary of what I had for breakfast that morning in Venice, and similar such things. The bottom line is: I keep a diary. Over the past 7-months I have actually accumulated a nice little pile of books filled with my scribbled handwriting, and they are the best souvenirs of my trip by far.

However, I do not see them as finished. Despite the fact that some of these diaries were written in the early stages of April and May, they are still being written. They are changing, evolving with my thoughts on my travels today. Occasionally, when I get time, I flick through the diaries of yester-month (it’s not a word, but it should be) and read what I wrote - what I found interesting, what I found new - and I can’t help but have a completely different perspective on what I experienced back then. One day I thought to myself that it would be a shame to lose that new perspective, in contrast with the old one… and so I started to make notes. If you look through my old diaries they are littered with post-it notes with tiny scribble trying to get my new perspective across, marks in the margins to remind me of things I forgot when I was writing the diary all that time ago, new thoughts and ideas overflowing the pages…….. As I said, my diary is still changing, evolving into something new every time I read it.

Most people, from my limited knowledge of the subject of what other people do in the privacy of their own homes (for all I know they could do the cha-cha until 6am), do not see their diaries this way. They spend maybe an hour pouring their hearts out onto a little piece of paper, or in more modern times, a tiny piece of a computer screen, and then it is put away and forgotten for years to come. Sure, the author may come back in years to come to read what their thirteen-year-old self reacted to their parents divorce, or the maths test next Friday, but it ends there. How do they feel about their parents divorce now? What about that maths test? Even the tiniest fragment of the past can be seen in a completely new perspective only a short time later. A diary should not be treated as a completed record of the past, but instead a growing record of developing perspectives on past events.

Besides, it makes it a lot more interesting to read the next time!

So if you keep a diary, or have diaries from past years, go back and flick through… Read a couple of pages here and there, and while you’re at it grab that post-it pad sitting on your desk and make some notes, anything, and leave a new record, keep your diary alive. If you don’t write a diary and never have, try it sometime! They’re good fun to read, even a month later, and I’ve been told that your grand kids will thank you for it!