Take a moment and ponder what it felt like going through one of your favorite experiences. The ones you’ll remember forever.
What are the first moments that come to mind?
Now, imagine trying to put that into spoken word. Easy peasy right? We’ve all verbally spoken our best times.
Here’s the deal though: when you attempt to capture your best times in written word, the experience begins to breathe its own life.
Words written, are the closest us mere mortals ever come to immortality.
Because when we write we outlast ourselves.
Catching Zeus’s lightning in a bottle, then letting it loose onto the page, keeps our energy even when we’re tired, busy, or gone. A stranger, years from now can step into your stormy afternoon and be shocked—simply because you chose an electric verb.
Writing is the difference between reminiscing and returning to the moment. It’s how we teach our future selves what really mattered and invite others to feel it too.
The Sylvia Beach Hotel’s Legendary Journals: Memories Locked In A Cage
If I know my potential audience at all, you will resonate deeply with these sentiments. Which leads me to the purpose of this page.
The legendary journals were the tool used in which you proved that the era of electronics has not completely killed romance and authenticity.
I felt you. All of you who were writing at 1:17 a.m., window cracked to the roar of the sea, dim red light bleeding under your door of the Amy Tan room, salt stinging your nose from an ocean-sneeze, pen nearly dry but still pressed hard because the sentence wont sleep. The ones with wine-stained lips and spectacles fogged by the warmth of your own laughter from remembering a joke that new friend told you only hours ago. The ones where you told the truth, though nobody in the room knew you—until they heard the lie you invented, the one you tried to make sound twice as believable as the truth.
I’m not selling nostalgia, because there is no price on such a thing here. I’m hear, to point at what you’ve built and say: this is the point.
You didn’t write in one of the journals for posterity or a plaque. You wrote because…..
The name on the building can change; the weather of the coast will keep doing what it does. But the life you gave to a blank page? That will never die.
Don’t ever stop writing your life into your journal, by hand, with ink, lead, or blood, right onto the back of a once living tree.
