Lately, I tend to scroll rapidly through items on Facebook and YouTube, looking for something to pay attention to, haphazardly passing random contents or only punching open a comic Jon Stewart or Desi Lydic Daily Show segment or a Stephen Colbert Late Show monologue. I seldom read anything posted at length or review any articles I notice, although I'm supposing—or pretending—that something published online will prompt me to write a thoughtful commentary or reactionary essay of my own, the kind of thing that, for several years, I composed and posted on my lapsed blog, www.rootwriting.com.
Last week, after reading "Paper Trail," Melissa Kirsch's online piece about writing a note to herself about herself and what she's doing, a kind of a chatty report that she might put aside, as other writers do, to only read again five years in the future, I wondered if I should follow her example. I haven't recently been writing journal entries, personal essays, or blog posts like the ones I composed regularly a couple years ago. Back then, I maintained a special website that let those short pieces go public. Nowadays, once a week, I only compose private notes—well, usually a single page of four fairly random paragraphs labeled "Notes," "Writing," "Working," and "Reading." The Notes paragraph starts the page with casual mention of personal social or business matters; the Reading paragraph ends it with a very short record of what my wife and I read aloud to one another before supper and what I later read alone in bed. The distinction I make between the two paragraphs in the middle of the page dates a long way back: "Writing" is about composing in process, "Working" is centered on what I'm getting—or at least hoping to get—done.
These days, these weeks, actually these months really, it's more of a struggle to find anything to record: sometimes the "Writing" paragraph is often virtually blank; under "Working" I tend to report more fully on accomplishing nothing. When I started this blog series. I usually filled two and a half or even three and a half pages; nowadays I barely ever fill one, although I can claim that this very paragraph is actually a revision of the "Writing" paragraph I originally composed.
After copying Melissa Kirsch's "Paper Trail" note to my laptop, I reread it several times. She distinguishes between writing a journal entry, which she sees as "an exercise in immediacy, a way of getting down what happened today, what's on my mind in this instant," and writing a letter, claiming that "[i]n a letter that attempted to capture my experience of being alive right now, I'd pull back, take a wide view and present the situation as more of an offering than a regurgitation. I'd try to convey something essential about who I am, what I believe and hold dear." She fears that, if she reads the letter five years from now, she might not "think my priorities and preoccupations worthwhile"; she hopes she will consider herself "wiser and more evolved" in 2030. "It makes me almost embarrassed to be me today."
Kirsch mentions a friend who "writes a letter to herself every year on her birthday, but she doesn't open them." I'm suddenly reminded of a period in my younger years of notetaking when, on my birthday and possibly also at New Year's, I too wrote what I thought updated myself and my situation. I just now went into my computer and found a December 31 Notes entry that listed both what I had accomplished in 2013 and what I hoped to do in 2014—I then taught online for a graduate program at Ashland University and simultaneously was composing The Arc of the Escarpment. Apparently, I also kept a handwritten journal where, I claimed, I would "save my whining for the New Year's Day journal entry." It might still be stashed in a box somewhere in our garage.
I'll possibly—probably—celebrate my 83rd birthday in a little over three months. It may not be prudent to expect to delay re-reading whatever I write now for five years. Instead, I'll keep wondering what I might have written in a 2020 New Year's blog entry and hope to track it down. More practically, I ought to write that kind of entry on New Year's Eve this year and make sure I can post it online.
Notes:
Kirsch, Melissa. "Paper trail." The New York Times The Morning (nytdirect@nytimes.com Sat 8/2/2025 4:05 AM)
(728 Words)