The Importance of Remembering

Notebooks. I live and swear by them for everything from university lecture notes to writing in my spare time and I've got a fair few floating around the place filled with just about everything you could think about writing down. In the last couple of days I've found myself searching out some of my older ones and having a thumb through them to see what they hold. Most of the stuff in them is lists, little bits of maths from my time at high school and lots and lots of poetry but, no matter what the content is, everything holds a memory for me. It is one of my habits that I'm most happy about because through these multiple notebooks I've managed (inadvertently) to paint a picture of myself from about 3 or 4 years ago which otherwise would have been lost and fleeting flashbacks in my head would be all that I have left. I find that it's important to remember who you were as well as who you are. The person that you are now owes a lot to the person that stood in your shoes in the past and having things to remind you of how you once were is one of the most invaluable tools at your disposal as we all seek to better ourselves.

To be fair I laughed at most of the stuff that I came across in these notebooks simply because it made me laugh. I wouldn't say that I was laughing at myself because I do self-deprecation well but not that well - the reason for the laughter was simply hindsight. I often say to myself that I'm going to look back on something that seems so important and laugh one day at the frivolity of it which is where these chuckles came from. I used to write a lot of poetry, the reason for which being that I got myself caught up on a couple of girls (one in particular) a few years ago and the only way that I felt I could express my feelings was through poetry. To this day (at least 3 years since I first started writing poetry) I can remember most of the lines that I composed 'from the heart'. I stumbled across a few of them in those notebooks and couldn't help but chuckle along with the younger me at how crazy that time was. But then I stop chuckling and realised something: that stuff really had an effect on me. I'm not going to go into all of that here because it's all in the past but it really did have a lasting impact on me that I still see in myself today. 

This 'record' that I have of all of this poetry and one-liners highlights mistakes that I've made and it is for this reason why I encourage everyone to write things down. Not only are these notebooks a reminder of who and what I used to be but they are provide a cold, hard reminder of the mistakes that I made. I must have spent hours writing about learning from your mistakes in the last couple of years but I don't think I've said it recently on this blog: learn from your mistakes people! If you are like me and have some old notebooks lying around somewhere then you should dig them out and see what they contain. Some of the stuff that are in mine is (without being too big-headed) pretty good but some of it also reminds me how much I've changed and how much those times have had an effect on me. I try all of the time to work out why I do certain things that I do or why I react in certain situations the way that I do and these notebooks - my notebooks - provide some very interesting background information on those matters.

I hope that, if you don't already, you start writing in notebooks. When I was jotting stuff down in mine a few years ago I didn't think much of it; now they are amongst my most treasured possessions and are much, much more valuable than the 50p that I spent on them in the first place.

Thanks for reading,

Martin