“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.”

Anne Frank

Why do we travel? 

To break away from the day to day, to experience beautiful sights and eat incredible food.  To learn a new culture.  To trace our roots, visit family and friends.  To relax and unwind, to discover, uncover and learn about ourselves.  We travel when we are stressed, when we are yearning or mourning, celebrating or working or even running away.

We have our reasons to go, but when we come back we should always bring with us a new lesson.  Travel is education.  We experience things we’ve never imagined and see worlds we previously knew nothing about. 

I think we should travel like students.  Keep your journal nearby. 

We think we’ll remember the way that sun looked, as it fell behind the cliffs.  There’s now way we’d ever forget the crispness in the air or the sing song voices of old women at the market.  Moments seem too gorgeous to forget, but we do.  Every day we’re pummeled with information and we loose track of details — but details enrich our lives.  A bird’s flickering eye, a brush of shoulders in line, the smell of sea and sweat.  Sensory details send us rushing back in time to those cherished moments in our lives.

I journal while I travel or while I am at home so I won’t forget. So I can look back and be transported.  Every instance in my life, every conversation and lingering eye contact adds up to create who I am.  We are what we have seen — felt, touch, tasted, heard, all of it.  How incredible to journal? To have a constant study of our own lives.  We can trace our opinions back to specific times and never forget why we blushed at that comment or cried alone in bed that night.  We have evidence and proof!

There are so many places to post.  Social media is brimming with information about who we are, or who we want to be.  But it’s public.  It’s been edited and thought over and carefully manufactured.

Journals are messy.  They’re unfinished and unapologetic.  They are raw intimate thoughts.  We learn along with our journals.  We work out problems and discover ourselves. Write about it. Let words flow with out judgement. If you are ever in a creative rut or want to find more clarity in your life, then I recommend ordering The Artist Way by Julia Cameron. You start every day with morning pages. They changed my life .

Pick one you love!  An old school spiral with blue lined pages, or one of those gorgeous leather bound books with yellow stock paper.  Get a lock or a tie.  But don’t feel like you need to write on paper.  Why not use technology to our advantage? Pull out your phone and open the notes.  Type out a quick thought, describe the way that croissant tastes or how thirsty you are for wine.  Sometimes our mind runs too quickly for our cramping hands.  Pull out your laptop and let your fingers roll.  Any medium is your canvas. 

Everyone takes pictures on trips, but pictures only capture one aspect of a moment.  Words tell the whole story.