Just Bought Some Ink

Imagine walking along a trail in the early morning. You see a beautiful sunrise in the distance and hear the calm lapping of water from the river next to your path. You feel calm and content for a moment. But your brain begins to obsess over how good the moment feels. You worry about your emotions returning to baseline after the experience ends. Intrusive thoughts enter your mind, "what did I do to feel so calm and content a minute ago?" and "how do I remember this feeling and process so that I can experience this happiness again?". When your mind begins to stray from the present moment and spiral into a rabbit hole of worry, you should take a break and journal. This is the perfect situation to write down your emotions and necessary cues to remind you of this experience and, most importantly how this experience made you feel. This is a process I call snapshot journaling because documenting experiences immediately after the fact is like taking a snapshot of one's...

Does your day-to-day look like this? Wake up, make breakfast, drive to work in intolerable rush hour traffic, get to the office at 9am, attend meetings, respond to never-ending emails, have lunch at 12pm, get back to the grind at exactly 1pm, go home at 5pm, scroll on your phone or watch TV while eating a microwave dinner out of exhaustion, stress about all the unfinished tasks you’ve left at work, and finally, go to bed to repeat the same thing the following morning. What do you think is wrong with this typical day-to-day life? Sure, there’s nothing so bad about it. It’s stable; it pays the bills and keeps a roof over your head. However, how does going through this schedule for five days a week for the rest of your life going to make you feel? I believe this sort of schedule kills your spirit of creativity because you don’t have time to experience a deep sense of boredom or reflect on your actions and the direction in which your life is moving. But, you might ask, why should I reflect...