When does a diary pay off?

Keeping on nodding terms with ourselves

My shelves of diaries

Hey y’all,

People occasionally ask me why I keep a diary. What it does for me. What, in icky business words, is the ROI, the Return on Investment.

I have answered this question explicitly before:

I keep a diary for many reasons, but the main one is: It helps me pay attention to my life. By sitting down and writing about my life, I pay attention to it, I honor it, and when I’ve written about it long enough, I have a record of my days, and I can then go back and pay attention to what I pay attention to, discover my own patterns, and know myself better. It helps me fall in love with my life.

And I’ve written about the importance of revisiting notebooks.

But today I want to show you what it’s like to have five or six years of daily diaries at your fingertips.

Here’s a spread from my weekend. (Censored a bit — this is, after all, my diary.) I took my 10-year-old son Owen to a synthesizer workshop at the Austin Public Library and I was sitting there sort of marveling at what a natural musician he is.

Where did this kid come from? I thought.

A quick dip into my diary from five years ago reveals what a silly question that is: