Did you keep a journal or diary when you were a child or teenager?  If not, are you thinking of starting one?  It need not be January to start getting your thoughts down on paper, especially in this crazy but significant year we are all living through.

The other day I decided to look through a few of my old diaries.  I assiduously kept a diary every year since I was in grade five until my late twenties.  At some point I transitioned to an electronic journal and continued in a stop-start fashion, only to yearn for writing again in different ways.  I also started this blog and other reflective or religious-inspired writings in poetry and prose.

I am so pleased that I decided to keep writing throughout my formative years as a youth, and throughout tumultuous world events which I also recorded with the enthusiasm of a serious journalist, complete with newspaper clippings.  The words that poured out of my young mind through my pencil and later on in pen (because, like, ink hadn’t been invented yet, right?) made me laugh out loud, cringe a little, and even tear up slightly.

As a ten-year-old beginner writer I cannot say that my daily musings were flattering: “I just learnt today that I hated my sister and not to talk to her again (eceppt tonight)”  Spelling, anyone?? (Oh yeah, haha, and little ones don’t hate on your big sister or brother – I cannot even remember why I felt that way.) 

Other sections of my diaries, when not covered in drawings and weather reports, made me guffaw.  As I grew older and became a teenager, I started experimenting with poetry and reflective writing without even realising what I was doing.  With emotions and hormones raging, writing simply poured out of me.  I would encourage those of you who have children (or if not, do this yourself) to create a space to just write free-form – let your own words flood your pages.  Writing not only brings relief but you will be fascinated when meeting your past self in the future.  It might even bring you great joy and, like me, a strong dose of self-kindness.

So I came across one poem that I wrote as a young teenager and decided to include it below for you, verbatim (forgive me!).  In the years between grade 5 (the end of primary school) and my beginning adolescence, I had obviously started to think more deeply about life.  Gone were the outlandish pencil pictures and copious weather reports.  It made me think about how the decades indeed pass so quickly, how we are shaped and change (this continues now), and how we must not take our lives or each other for granted. 

Reading this poem so many years later in this momentous year of 2020, far from my little pictures and joyful, carefree explosions of writing – and as we tentatively start to emerge from our lockdowns – I thought of the thousands of people who have died of COVID-19, the heroes of our time who are helping to save lives and minister to others in many selfless ways, those who fight for justice for the oppressed, and the ordinary people in our communities who are true saints because of their persistence in surviving each day. From my fourteen-year-old self, let us remember them. God bless and love you all.

Gone But Still Remembered

T’is true that life is strange, we live and go away,
and decades pass before us, through bad and sunny days,
and legends make a mark, in the olden pages of time,
making people happy, and glad to be alive,
but time still ticks on, as the world turns around,
with treasured times and years, in one’s mind can be found,
those memories trapped in yesterday, the thrillers of that time,
are gone but still remembered, still in our hearts and mind.

T’was only but yesterday, that time was moving slow,
like ice put out of a freezer, to watch it melt and go,
to watch the great big sun go down, and with it takes the day,
what you did just one minute ago, is now just yesterday,
behind the golden sun, likes the olden book of time,
where legends made their marking, and no one else can find,
“we have to live in modern times”, some people shout and say,
but for some on this olden earth, they long for yesterday,
those memories trapped in yesterday, the thrillers of that time,
are gone but still remembered, still in our hearts and mind.

Image Credit: pixabay.com