Of course you keep a journal when you travel.
You step off a plane or emerge from the car after a long drive and you’ve put yourself into a whole new world. It’s a cliché but travel really does expand the mind… and a journal is like back up storage.
I write constantly. I write every single day. There isn’t a day I don’t open up a computer, put my fingers over a keyboard and just start typing something. It would be easy for me to be overly judgemental about this and wag my finger at people who don’t write stuff down when they set off on adventure… and I’m not saying you MUST do it. I’m really saying you SHOULD try it.
Journalling while travelling is more than just muddling around with a pen and paper when you could be sitting on the beach with a book or a drink (or maybe both) in your hand. Writing things down isn’t extra work you need to do back at the hotel when you could be sleeping or catching up on your social media feeds. Keeping notes about your adventure doesn’t need to be complex or rigid or even grammatically correct.
I do believe it enhances the experience, though.
Assuming the experience is something you care to remember, a journal is a memory capsule for experience. We go about our lives every single day and don’t realize how much we overlook and forget. When everything is familiar at home your brain doesn’t need to remember anything but the handful of differences it encounters. But travelling? Everything is new. Everything is fresh. You step off the cruise ship into a brand new world and every set piece is novel. You blunder off the tour bus and you are met with a world you’ve likely never seen and may never see again. You pay the taxi driver and step out of the cab into a landscape that is filled with things your brain needs to work full time to keep up to understand, let alone remember.
And it seems like for those short term few days it will all stick, that you’ll never forget this moment… but you will. It may get filed away in your brain somewhere, but recalling that memory weeks or years later? Good luck.
…unless you take a few minutes each day—waiting for your coffee order, taking a break at the hotel, or just resting in a park for a spell—to write something down. Journal. Try it.
Terms FROm this POSt
- brand
- Even seasoned advertising and marketing folks sometimes struggle to pin this definition to the ground, but in essence it implies more than a logo or a tag line. A brand is the entirety of how one is perceived by the public, and it can be inclusive of, yes, logos, colours and names, but also values, vibe, and style. Corporate brands are common, but personal brands are an idea that has gained particular prominence in the internet era when people put on a public persona that represents their effort to influence others or promote their ideas, politics, or work.
- cliché
- It’s so overused itself that cliché has almost become self-referential. What does it mean when the very idea of a thing becomes weighed down by the diminishing impact of its own existence? Gah, where have I heard that one before.
- keyboard
- Maybe it’s for typing. Maybe it’s for coding. Maybe it’s for making music. A bed of buttons arrayed for digital input is my favourite user interface and I’ll write about them often in their many varieties.
- social media
- You almost certainly found this post because it was posted on someone’s feed. The platforms are terrible, but as it stands they are about the only way to find an audience in this crazy version of the internet. I avoid the socials when I can, but to ignore their existence is to toil forever in obscurity.
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