At the end of November, I celebrated a birthday. When I announced the milestone at a small gathering, a new friend wanted to give me something to mark the occasion and found an unused journal among her things, which she presented to me. It was nothing fancy, but it called to mind my history with pen and paper and the different kinds of wire spirals or glue stripped spines that held pages of my thoughts together.

A couple decades ago, I kept a morning pages practice, in Julia Cameron style, and for a long time, I faithfully wrote in dialogue style, a conversation with Spirit, which I referred to as Talking with God.

Over the years, I kept simple gratitude journals. I also had special notebooks where I recorded insights gained after retreats, or I used journals to list the pros and cons of possible actions and think through decisions that way.

Sometimes, I wrote entries in fancy notebooks (often people gifted me blank journals because, as a writer, they assumed I would always be ready to fill the pages), and sometimes I wrote my thoughts on college ruled lined paper, which I would place in a three-ring binder.

Though I always valued the process of putting pen to paper and getting my thoughts down, I was undisciplined about how I organized my journals.

I didn’t reserve a place of honor for them. I didn’t store them on a specific shelf or in a brown corrugated box with JOURNALS marked with black Sharpie on the side. I couldn’t even say definitively where all my personal journals are.

There were often gaps in time from when I made daily entries to when I seemed to abandon the ritual only to pick up the pen years later. And I had a very sloppy way of dating entries.

I usually scrawled the month and date before an entry but often didn’t record the year, as if I thought that I would somehow remember the year based on the cover.

As 2014 came to a close, while I was re-arranging the contents of my guest closet, I came across a handful of old journals. One was from 2007. I wasn’t sure when the others were filled out.

I read a few pages from each bound collection, and still couldn’t tell when the entries were written. Maybe there was a different man in my life, or I had a different job, or I was into a different author, but my concerns and longings were always very much the same.

I wanted to feel I had creative outlets and receptive audiences for what I wanted to express. I wanted to feel connected to something greater than myself. I wanted to feel loved for who I was. My circumstances may have changed, but I don’t think my character has.

Many years ago, I took a workshop given by a successful area journalist. It was called, Writing to Save Your Life. I originally balked at the title. How arrogant, I thought, that people smitten with the urge to write would feel they had to record the details of their experiences, or they’d just die. Later, it dawned on me that “saving” one’s life was about preserving it, what was important about it, in writing not just, literally, about perpetuating it.

In stumbling across journals from different periods of my life, I could bemoan the fact that most of my preoccupying concerns remained constant. I could interpret this as a failure to move on from one thing to the next thing. But I’ve chosen to look at this, “the more things change, the more the stay the same,” as the best understanding to have.

Seeing your life in your journals’ pages this way is a special blessing.

Seeing that you are becoming more of who you already are is no small thing.