I’ve been writing stuff for as long as I can remember. It’s ironic, really, when I think back to my school days in the sixties and seventies when my understanding of the need for education didn’t exist. I drifted through those schooling years with no purpose other than to have a laugh, be the class fool, and be the target for the bullies.
I’d always liked the idea of writing a diary, and like so many of us, I’d start one with enthusiasm and, within a few days or weeks, get bored with the concept. This usually happened because I could never think of anything to write about. My entries would look something like this:
“Went to school. Got a puncture and had to push the bike home. Did gardening for Dad and got 15p. Watched ‘The Sweeney’ on telly.”
Later in life, I kept many notes when I became interested in this work with the spirit world. I used to take a notebook to church to take notes from the philosophy. I wasn’t doing it for anything other than as a reminder to myself of a powerful phrase or message from the speaker on the podium.
My mentor at that time was a keen advocate for journaling. He believed it was essential for students to be able to look back at their notes as time passed and learn how far they had come. I still have many of those books in my drawer, though I tend to write digitally these days.
As part of creating this website library, I must revisit many of the articles I wrote and made public. But this has become quite a slow process. I’m reading stuff I wrote only a couple of years ago and cringing at some spelling and grammar errors.
I only got a CSE grade F in English Language back in 1973. I couldn’t tell you the difference between a vowel or a verb! It was all gobbledegook to me. To be honest, I’m not much wiser nowadays.
The point is, by reading through my old journals and articles on the internet, I can appreciate how far I’ve come with my personal education. I think I’m lucky, though. My friend Lynn Cottrell once said that everyone has a creative gene for art in themselves. Mine seems to be for writing. And I do believe it’s an art form.
I’ve seen some of my medium friends’ attempts at writing and have often been shocked at the poor standards. Yet they’re better mediums than I will ever be! So I’m lucky in that respect, I suppose.
I wish I could look back on some of my articles without cringing as much as I am doing. There has been more than one occasion recently where the articles I’ve written in the past have been so poor I’ve deleted them altogether.
I don’t mind reading something I’ve written that I now feel is inaccurate. That is progress, in my opinion. Things that, at one time, I didn’t understand or didn’t believe, that nowadays I hold a different opinion regarding. That’s progress.
I just wish more people, especially students of this work with spirit, would build time into their life to diarise their progress. Without recorded markers from the past how can we know we’ve moved forward?
Interesting Thought
When I held a circle in this very room some years ago, I issued each new student with a spiral-bound notebook. Quite fancy ones, too. However, when the circle closed, mainly due to each student’s lack of desire to attend regularly, not one of them asked to keep their notebooks. It suggests to me that what they wrote in them held little or no importance.