Writing during midlife to reawaken what has been lurking deep within us is one of the greatest pleasures of this stage! Let out the ideas, plans and desires that you started to work on but then lost amongst the busy-ness of everyday life, and don’t forget to get down those things that never made it into existence.
The process of journaling each day may appear to simply be more work. Too many people have negative memories of school essays, and having them negatively critiqued by teachers and classmates, so came to the conclusion that writing is far from fun. Many books about journaling exist, but the bottom line is that now YOU are in charge of what you put down on the page.
No one else needs ever read it so it becomes a catalog of your thoughts, just for your own benefit. The other thing that separates journaling from school essays is that it is best when you don’t immediately re-read and re-work what you’ve written. The goal is to let your thoughts pour out without censoring them, spell-checking them, or worrying about grammar or punctuation.
By letting go of old ideas about writing, your deeper thoughts and beliefs can come up through the years and emerge on your page. It is astonishing what comes out when you are liberated from the ‘school essay’ mindset! As you are able to relax and let your thoughts flow out, you will find why you really want or don’t want to do something, instead of just a vague feeling about the topic.
This is also an opportunity to explore what you used to find really exciting and to work out what was in that idea that you may now want to re-awaken. Some ideas may seem less than relevant to you as an adult, but keep digging down into why that hobby or activity engrossed you so much as a child, and then see how that same characteristic can be re-awakened in your adult life.
