Last weekend I went to the bookstore to purchase a blank book for a journal for the upcoming year. The second part of this annual ritual is to reread the present year’s journal in order to remember and reflect what I did and thought this year. I do not have to tell you 2020 was unique. Unlike previous reads there were no reminiscences of trips for they were all canceled. There were a lot of ‘what is going to happen’ entries about covid and Mother’s failing health. All in all 2020 resembled a Greek tragedy in which the actors do not know what will happen but you do and there is no preventing it.

Reading Journal 2020 reminded me there were some events other than daily doings. In March I lost a tooth (#14 to be exact) and this year I read 44 books and made 14 soups. I managed to achieve nearly all my resolutions except ‘go to the gym regularly”. Oh well.

The pages were mostly full up with daily doings (hardly worth recording) and with worries of which none of them really panned out – again. Sometimes I think this is the real point of journaling. It is not for documenting what happened but to assure my future self NO MATTER WHAT HAPPENED YOU GOT THROUGH IT. I am getting better at this viz. my angst entries are not as dark or as hysterical as in past years. True, the worries I wrote* were sometimes quite nasty but none were so devastating as I feared they would. Indeed most of them I did not remember until I reread them.

Dare I joke hindsight for once really is 2020?

I plan to keep journaling for I like having a place to put down my thoughts other than here online. In 2021 will write with more awareness my future self will be reading this a year’s hence and asking ‘really though”.

Here is a photo I took this morning when I went into work. It’s cold in my office at this time of year, so I brought along a sweater. I realized it is the same sweater I am wearing in the framed photograph.** This was taken sometime between 2001-2005. The sweater and I have endured fifteen years abdneither one of us have any moth holes.

This little bit of synchronicity at the end of the year makes for a good entry for tonight’s journal entry. It is apropos at the end of a year of doubt, sorrow, and worry.

 

 

* The main ones: tooth infection, covid; Mother’s decline, threats at work and the election.

**It is a photograph of a men’s group of which I was a member.