(#036) Journaling and Living the Present
My first journal entry is dated November 15, 1979.
I was born on December 19, 1979.
Yes, my journal starts a month before I was born: a photograph of my mother, nearly nine months pregnant. And…
Trust me, I’m definitely in that photograph.
I’ve been keeping a journal for most of the past twenty years. Over the last five or so, I’ve gone further—scavenging old emails, files, and photographic archives (both in “the cloud” and in dusty storage rooms) to unearth what happened, in detail, so I can revisit the past at will.
I’ve also built tools to analyze my journals.
Some map annual arcs.
Some track multi-year themes: family, friends, personal growth; health and fitness; business pursuits; creative work; personal finance, etc.
Others follow my career and entrepreneurial ventures—from inception through entanglement to resolution.
And then there are the obsessive tags for transversal searches. Here’s a taste:
Tag “Goodbye Beijing”? The last day I spent in Beijing (where I used to travel for work) for each year I lived in China.
Tag “Filson”? Every time my trusted Filson rucksack appears in a photo (and there are hundreds of these entries).
Tag “POM (Proud of Myself)”? Self-explanatory but, more specifically, all those moments when I made a tough decision that ended up making me stronger later in my life.
Tag “All the Life in One Year”? Where I strive to piece together a “perfect year” with one entry for each day of the calendar, drawn from any year of my life (e.g., July 12th is from 2009, October 31st is from 2010, etc.). I’ll likely never finish—but the pursuit is joyful.
What do I get out of this obsession?
For starters, one of the greatest gifts of this practice is how it alters my perception of time—making it feel both relative and meaningful.
Events once catastrophic—or life-defining—are proven to pass more quickly than I feared—or hoped.
Pursuits that seemed unattainable—moving to China, starting a business, learning English in my teens, Mandarin in my twenties—in fact rarely took more than a few years, sometimes just months. In hindsight, they shrink to dots in the vast constellation of life experience.
The intense, saturated impressions life hurled at me in the moment fade into pastel carousels. Freed from the anxiety of the outcome, I revisit these memories—finding new beauty, reframing narratives, and—even if selectively—embellishing them in ways that serve where I’ve been and where I’m going.
At the same time, the most unremarkable days often become the juice of the story, in retrospect:
An unremarkable picture of me on a Monday morning in the office—the one I left to start my first company.
Dinner of dumplings bought from a street vendor—before the neighborhood was razed to make room for skyscrapers.
An iced Americano and chocolate muffin (back when those had a place in my diet!) at the Shanghai Station before yet another trip to yet another new city—a ritual that took me through every corner of China (and, yes, there’s a tag for that “What Starbucks Meant to Me.”)
Plain details take on meaning beyond words. They remind me that the smallest things often define the greater story.
I don’t live in the past—far from it. I’m restlessly, hopelessly active—but
reflective journaling is a powerful way to find meaning and forward motion, especially on those days when it feels as if the present is working against you. It can pierce self-doubt, expand claustrophobic moments, and shift the focus to bigger questions:
What narrative arc am I in right now?
How did I get here?
What have I already proved to be capable of?
But there are side effects.
This week, a conversation with K—a dear friend I’ve mentioned before—reminded me how much effort it takes, and how much pride it warrants, living the present fully.
It made me wonder: could there be unexpected consequences to my journaling?
When you build the muscle for storytelling and meaning-making, there’s a risk: the story starts to take over your life.
When a handful of events align neatly, you might—consciously or not—nudge reality to complete the arc.
A company startup? There has to be grind, and then success.
Love at first sight? Surely followed by a cinematic date, then a romance.
A gym membership? How can there not be three months of sacrifice, and then a new body.
But life isn’t linear, and very often takes unexpected turns. If we force it to match the story we wished to be living, we can miss subtle cues—or warning sirens—and drag things on long past their natural end.
The question
Am I chasing my best life, or just the story I wish I were living?
should find a place in everyone’s agenda on a recurring basis because—no matter how amazing we can reassemble the facts—in the long run
Life always writes the best story.
L.F
(Read this article on Medium.)
