How I Journal

My prompts for daily journalling

This week I delivered a guest lecture to a postgraduate leadership class at the University of Canberra. I lectured on the importance of self-knowledge in becoming an effective leader, with a focus on Stoicism and journalling. The most common question I am asked when I lecture on this topic is: How do you journal?

I began keeping a daily journal on 3rd December 2016. Since then, I have developed a simple formula that helps me to write, even when I don't feel like it. In this article, I outline the process and the resources I use when journalling.

Why keep a journal?

Marcus Aurelius kept a journal, and so did Seneca. The primary purpose of keeping a journal is to live the examined life (as espoused by Socrates) but also to "declutter the mind". Journalling is also central to the practice of Stoic philosophy. For the simplest overview of this philosophy, read the first paragraph of Epictetus' Enchiridion. This sounds simple enough, but to actually believe in the correctness of the philosophy requires daily practice. If one doesn't constantly remind oneself that what is good and bad is within us and we choose how we react to external events, it is easy to slip into old habits. Journalling is a powerful tool to not only establish new habits, but to keep Stoic philosophy at the forefront of living.

And what is the best time to write? Again, Aurelius wrote in the morning as part of his daily preparation, and Seneca wrote in the evening to reflect on the day that was, so I journal both in the morning and the evening. 

Keeping the discipline of journalling can be difficult, so there is some self-discipline involved. Research by James W. Pennebaker suggests that writing about and to oneself (as Aurelius did) can improve our mental health and well-being. But the proof is in the pudding: whenever I miss a morning session (which has happened twice), and even though I have "caught up" with my morning routine that same evening, I have found myself to flounder during the day. 

The reverse is not so true. If I miss an evening (which has also happened a couple of times, particularly when travelling), as long as I catch up the next morning, the effect is less drastic (although I do tend to forget some of the lessons learnt during the previous day).

What do I write?

I had tried several times in the past to keep a journal, but the purpose always escaped me. My writing was directed by my mood, and I was often too tired to write anything meaningful. At the beginning of 2017, I purchased a copy of Ryan Holiday's The Daily Stoic and used the daily meditations as a prompt for my writing. This was simply a case of reading the daily meditation, then writing about the ideas or the quote or whatever else entered my mind. This led me to add a number of other daily prompts.

I use three other books that provide prompts for my reflection and writing. The first work is Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, where he outlines his thirteen-week virtues program. Franklin deliberately practised each of what he considered to be the thirteen key virtues, focusing on one each week, and leaving the rest to happen by chance. At the end of each day, Franklin assessed himself against each virtue, making a mark in a table against the virtue he had compromised that day. His idea was to complete four 13-week programs each year. 

Franklin was realistic, and accepted that humans can never be perfect. But self-improvement was the goal, and the daily process forces one to take stock of the daily practice of the thirteen virtues. Self-awareness is the greater part of the battle.

The second work is La Rochefoucauld's Maxims. Although very witty and rather sarcastic at times, I enjoy the way La Rochefoucauld is realistic. His is not all positive thinking, but rather a reminder that we are human, and despite the best intentions, we can never be perfect.

The third work is James Allen's (1921) collection of morning and evening meditations, As A Man Thinketh. Allen believed in the law of attraction: that we bring into our lives the things that we hope for (and the reverse). He meant we attract inward states, not a McMansion or a Lamborghini. But Allen also believed that we can control our own minds, and only through a process of self-analysis and self-examination and deliberate reflection, bit by bit, can we conquer ourselves (and therefore the universe).

At the beginning and end of each session of journalling, I draw on Franklin's Virtues Journal and prepare myself for the day ahead, then assess my behaviour each evening. Again, one can never be perfect (as Franklin admitted), but it does provide a long-running record of behaviours and indicates rather clearly one's strengths and weaknesses.

The Routine

Each morning, I write systemically against the following:

1. Reflection on the day ahead, and any thoughts that I "slept" on.
2. La Rochefoucauld's Maxims. Usually, I write the maxim out in full.
3. James Allen's morning thoughts. I usually summarise the key parts for the relevant day (there are 31 days with morning and evening thoughts, so it is a month long process).
4. Ryan Holiday's The Daily Stoic. I summarise the key parts for each day (there are 366 meditations).
5. Ryan Holiday's Daily Stoic Journal. There is a question relating to 4 above and I write in the journal in pencil. There is a short space for journalling in the morning and evening.
6. Franklin's Virtues Journal. I ask myself "What good shall I do today?" 

Each evening, I write systemically against the following:

1. Reflection on the day just gone, and any issues or lessons learnt.
2. James Allen's evening thoughts. I summarise the key parts for the relevant day.
3. The Daily Stoic Journal: I write in pencil against the day's question.
4. Virtues Journal. I assess myself against the 13 virtues, place a black circle where I compromised the virtue, an open circle where I could improve for next time, and a tick when I feel I did the right thing, and a blank if there was nothing related to the virtue.

The Results

It is difficult to assess oneself objectively, but the key thing for me is that I have developed an evidence base on my own thoughts, behaviours, and issues. Because it is my evidence, I have little choice but to accept it. This provides an important "mirror" in which I can see my behaviour more clearly. I suppose the process is a form of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. But the process is my own, and I do enjoy it. While others may not notice an improvement in my behaviour, the benefits are importantly internal.

As James Allen would say, we must fly to the "Rock of Refuge" which resides deep within our soul, and with our minds, we either forge weapons for our own destruction, or tools with which to quarry the mine of our soul. The point is to develop an "inner citadel" where we can be at peace, and all of our "possessions" reside. Not earthly possessions, but the possessions of our very soul. 

This is just one way of practising Stoic journalling, but it works for me. Even on the days when I have no clue what to write, I can read and reflect on the various texts. This usually becomes a trigger for personal reflection.

But it must be daily. Seneca (I think it was) said something about how his entire philosophy was battered and bruised every time he left his house. 

It is only through morning and evening practice that I can stay true to the philosophy: to focus on what I can control, and be indifferent to external events, and to act right in response to the things that I cannot control. 

Daily journalling makes Stoicism work. It justifies why Ryan Holiday says "Journalling is Stoicism". And I think he is right.

This is why you should read the classics...

Luigi Silori and Italo Calvino (1958). Photo by Duccio55, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia.

Why Read the Classics? by Italo Calvino

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the second book of Calvino's work, and the only of his non-fiction works, that I have read. The first was Marcovaldo, a collection of short stories about an Italian peasant who attempts to "reconcile country habits with urban life". I was aware that Calvino was regarded as something of a philosopher, and the title of this work intrigued me after reading Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book. What I found interesting about Why Read the Classics?, which is effectively a collection of book reviews, is that Calvino covers from Homer to the present, adding a touch of personal insight into each review, and a depth that is still beyond my reading of the Great Books. Calvino does what I have been doing for some time now (albeit I do this nowhere near as well). I suspect that the individual essays in this collection were written as Calvino read or re-read these classic authors and their books. The first essay, which provides the title of the book, provides Calvino's list of fourteen definitions of a "classic book". In the introduction, the translator, Martin McLaughlin, uses Calvino's definitions to put forward an all-encompassing definition that I find useful in identifying "classic" works with more than just "old" works:

A classic work is a work which (like each of Calvino's texts) retains a consciousness of its own modernity without ceasing to be aware of other classic works of the past.

Of the thirty-six essays, only eleven of the essays had appeared in English before. This immediately strikes me as fortunate, yet, at the same time, somewhat saddened that there is so much that monolingual readers like myself will never have the opportunity to read. Calvino provides confirmation of Mortimer Adler's view on reading classic works, and justifies my own stance on using my time for a first-hand reading, even though I must admit that a good deal of my learning up until completing my PhD was based on secondary sources (beyond journal articles and historical texts). Calvino suggests that:

Reading a classic must also surprise us, when we compare it to the image we previously had of it. That is why we can never recommend enough a first-hand reading of the text itself, avoiding as far as possible secondary bibliography, commentaries, and other interpretations.

What I also find interesting is that Calvino explains what I feel when re-reading classic works that I may not have understood when I was younger. For example:

When we reread the book in our maturity, we then rediscover these constants which by now form part of our inner mechanisms though we have forgotten where they came from.

This leads me to another of Calvino's definitions which rings true:

A classic is a book which even when we read it for the first time gives the sense of rereading something we have read before.

I have experienced this many times before, however, it was most obvious recently when reading John Stuart Mill and Ruskin. In yet another definition, Calvino explains this further:

A classic does not necessarily teach us something that we did not know already; sometimes we discover in a classic something which we had always known (or had always thought we knew) but did not realise that the classic text had said it first (or that the idea was connected with the text in a particular way). And this discovery is also a very gratifying surprise, as is always the case when we learn the source of an idea, or its connection with the text, or who said it first.

Again, Calvino justifies my own approach. For example, he says that a "person who derives maximum benefit from a reading of the classics is the one who skilfully alternates classic readings with calibrated doses of contemporary material" (p. 8). That is not to say that I consider myself to be particularly wise. Indeed, Calvino tells me that my reason for alternating classics with contemporary materials might be "the result of an impatient, nervy temperament, of someone constantly irritated and dissatisfied". This is probably closer to the truth. In Calvino's essay on the Odyssey he discusses the nature of folktales. In this way he echoes Aristotle's Poetics. For example, he looks at stories of rags to riches or the more complex riches to rags and back to riches again and how these different types of misfortune are enjoyed by all because these represent "the restoration of an ideal order belonging to the past" (p. 13). In some ways, this explains why I like the classics, yet Calvino warns us that:

The contemporary world may be banal and stultifying, but it is always the context in which we have to place ourselves to look either backwards or forwards (p. 8).

So Calvino is not simply a "stuck in the mud", but for me, he places the classics in an appropriate context. While much was familiar in these essays, there was also a good deal of work that was unfamiliar to me. Many of these authors did not produce their works in English, hence my unfortunate lack of knowledge. One such author, Stendhal, introduced me to the interesting idea that "liberty and progress... was suffocated by the Restoration" (p. 136), and that Pliny considered there to be a "tacit accord" reached between peoples about "three cultural facts". These include "the adoption of the (Greek and Roman) alphabet; shaving of men's faces by Barber; and the marking of the hours of the day on a sundial" (pp. 44-5). There are some familiar authors too, including Dickens, Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, and Ernest Hemingway. And I was pleasantly surprised to see that the behaviourist, B.F. Skinner, makes an appearance (p. 116), albeit briefly. There is little to be gained from going over each of the essays, however, I have kept notes that I can return to in accordance with Mortimer Adler's rules for reading. The concluding essay, Parvese and Human Sacrifice, provides an interesting response to politics that is relevant today:

...as though he were shrugging his shoulders because everything is already clear and is not worth expending any more words (p. 263).

However, it is "The Philosophy of Raymond Queneau", the second last essay, that concludes the work best for me, in that the written word need not be pompous and unwelcoming, where a writer could make the reader:

...feel on the same level as he is, as they were about to play a round of cards with friends... [yet such a writer] is in reality someone with a cultural background that can never be fully explored, the background whose implications and presuppositions, explicit or implicit, one can never exhaust (p. 246).

Calvino wrote many other works, including novels and non-fiction, and although I understand he was a very private person, his letters have recently been published. I think I shall read more of his fiction and non-fiction before I delve further into the his private life. But clearly, there is much to be learnt from reading Calvino.

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Kapuściński's Magical Journey: Fact or Fiction?

30-years of Solidarity mural in Ostrowiec Swietokrzyski. Photo by Krugerr (2010) CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia.

An Advertisement for Toothpaste by Ryszard Kapuściński

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Ryszard Kapuściński was born in Belarus and grew up in Poland. He is regarded as one of the greatest journalists of the twentieth century for his coverage of revolutions and coups in places including Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. In the 1950s, he began working for the Polish Press Agency (PAP), a communist state-run news service. It is interesting that, since Kapuściński's death, he has been criticised for "making up" the news he reported in order to perpetuate his legend. Yet Kapuściński believed that poets were best-placed to be journalists, as they knew both style and brevity, and his works of fiction, including novels and short stories, were enough to put him in the running for the Nobel Prize in Literature. This book of four stories covers the lives of the poor in Poland. The stories include: An Advertisement for Toothpaste, Danka, The Taking of Elżbieta, and The Stiff. In very few words, Kapuściński's short stories bring to life the subtitle of the work these stories are drawn from: Nobody Leaves: Impressions of Poland, which were only translated into English in 2017. To borrow from various other critics, Kapuściński's style is most notably "sympathetic" to the people he writes about. The biography published by Artur Domoslawski after Kapuściński's death provides the most "plausible" critique, not so much of his work, but of his ability to tell a story while being somewhat liberal with the facts. But on reading these four stories, I have an image of life in the poorer parts of Poland. The reader can see the church in the shadow of the commune, one can feel the strange place of Poland as a country of white people who were, in effect, colonised by whiter people, and apparently Kapuściński used this to his advantage when travelling through revolutionary/post-colonial Africa to give him access (and escape) from places no other white person could. To come back to Poland, and the focus of these four short stories, I can picture it in my mind as if it had been painted for me, but written in a minimalist style that provides sufficient structure for me to draw the rest. Not like Hemingway's icebergs, for there is sufficient meat on the literary bones, but in such a short space as to indicate the extent of Kapuściński's genius. I expect to return to Kapuściński's work again soon, and I can only hope his books are nearly as good as these short stories. These, as far as I can tell, are all regarded as "travel writing" (a genre I enjoy). The recent emergence of Kapuściński's "lost" (i.e. untranslated) works in English leaves me wondering how much literary brilliance is left waiting to be discovered throughout the world. It also makes me wonder where we would be without books such as this accessible Penguin series of translated works. Kapuściński was fluent in several languages and witnessed much of the undoing of colonialism and communism. It is little wonder that his work is so good, and one can only imagine how his experience of the world shaped his craft. And rather than be envious, I must admit to feeling pleased that I can experience his travels in the safety and comfort of my own home, for surely such a life was hard work. I like to think that Kapuściński's "magical journalism" comes from the magic he sought through his living, and that some of his magic rubs off on those who are fortunate enough to read his works.

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