Dear Huhana and Kāhu ō te Rangi,
So I started writing these letters to you, but it’s kind of a blog too.
There’s some really good reasons you should keep a journal or blog – but I’ve only included three. Mainly because I’m sick with a cold and that’s all I’m capable of doing right now.
I bought this book Memento: The Gift of a Lifetime by Michael McQueen a while back. It’s basically a journal with pointed questions you fill out for your kids.
I’ve always used rap writing as a kind of journal, but there’s a bunch of mundane everyday or work stuff that nobody with the use of their fingers would ever click play to listen to and even if they would I could never rap good enough to turn that into music, so I keep a journal too.
Reasons to journal:
- 1) It’s a good way to reflect on the good and bad I’ve done in the week/month and it helps me work through any frustrations that the pull up bar can’t fix.
- 2) It’s (nearly) as good as talking through problems/situations with someone else, things make more sense when I’ve talked it through with the page.
- 3) Obama does it, so it must be good:
In my life, writing has been an important exercise to clarify what I believe, what I see, what I care about, what my deepest values are. The process of converting a jumble of thoughts into coherent sentences makes you ask tougher questions. – President Obama
On top of the regular blogging/journal good stuff I wanted to be able to write the thinks I thought my little girl would like to know when she was old enough to read (more like the stuff her Dad thinks she should know). But while I’m all about handwriting, I’m 90% sure I will have managed to lose this book by the time she’s old enough to read it – so I thought I’d put it here on the world wide web of writing instead (half the reason for this blog). If you’re not enough of a geek to start a blog for your kid(s) and want to put pen to paper instead but haven’t done much writing before, check out the Memento book here at Amazon.
You can see the kind of questions and writing it tries to kick off on in the pic of the contents, it’s a pretty cool way get some direction on good writing topics if you’re as stink at starter sentences as I am.