I was taken on a tour of a small community library in Tokyo a few weeks ago. I think it was a Saturday.
First, wow was it funded. It reminded of my community library 50 years ago in Los Angeles. Gleaming, stacked with materials, and so many learning corners and interactive displays. Second, it was 80% filled with visitors, of all ages. I found it all reassuring that there still are working minds in this world.
The funding depends on the community, of course, but the visitors -- that's pretty consistent. Aside from those who are there at any given moment there are also patrons who just pop in for a moment to pick up holds (that's mostly me these days), and our huge mass of online users. In fact, the live virtual events I host for my library on Zoom these days have had audience members from all over the United States and as far as Taiwan!
I'll also tip a hat here to the Liverpool Central Library and the British Library, which I was delighted to discover actualy does function like a real library and not a museum. Every time I"ve been there for research, the tables are filled to capcity with young people and their laptops. (Maybe they just have a great internet connection, I dunno)
I also never saw the sense in keeping a journal for the same reasons you suggest. But there was a several year period of my life after I got back from the Camino through when I moved to Maine where it became crucial to my evolving sense of self and purpose. I really understood the power of writing things down, longhand, even if I already (think I) know what they are. I say "think" because there's something in the act of journaling where we surprise ourselves, when we come to it with an open mind and heart. Writing things down, like making art, reveals them in ways that just thinking them doesn't.
Then after, I finished the first journal, I went back and read it through and highlighted the parts that still spoke to me and made a note about them on the flyleaf. Thus began a practice of repeating this. When I'd finish a journal, I'd go back and re-read the highlighted portions of the old ones, keeping what still seemed useful and crossing out on the flyleaf the stuff that hadn't held up, then highlighting in the new one.
I kept up this practice until the time when I went back and realised that nothing I'd written served me or felt true any longer. I felt at that point that I'd used that tool the way it had been meant to be used at the time, and that it had finished out its purpose.
I still have them, I doubt I'll reread them. But they were a great gift to me for several years in a way that I don't think anything else could have been.
I was taken on a tour of a small community library in Tokyo a few weeks ago. I think it was a Saturday.
First, wow was it funded. It reminded of my community library 50 years ago in Los Angeles. Gleaming, stacked with materials, and so many learning corners and interactive displays. Second, it was 80% filled with visitors, of all ages. I found it all reassuring that there still are working minds in this world.
The funding depends on the community, of course, but the visitors -- that's pretty consistent. Aside from those who are there at any given moment there are also patrons who just pop in for a moment to pick up holds (that's mostly me these days), and our huge mass of online users. In fact, the live virtual events I host for my library on Zoom these days have had audience members from all over the United States and as far as Taiwan!
I'll also tip a hat here to the Liverpool Central Library and the British Library, which I was delighted to discover actualy does function like a real library and not a museum. Every time I"ve been there for research, the tables are filled to capcity with young people and their laptops. (Maybe they just have a great internet connection, I dunno)
I also never saw the sense in keeping a journal for the same reasons you suggest. But there was a several year period of my life after I got back from the Camino through when I moved to Maine where it became crucial to my evolving sense of self and purpose. I really understood the power of writing things down, longhand, even if I already (think I) know what they are. I say "think" because there's something in the act of journaling where we surprise ourselves, when we come to it with an open mind and heart. Writing things down, like making art, reveals them in ways that just thinking them doesn't.
Then after, I finished the first journal, I went back and read it through and highlighted the parts that still spoke to me and made a note about them on the flyleaf. Thus began a practice of repeating this. When I'd finish a journal, I'd go back and re-read the highlighted portions of the old ones, keeping what still seemed useful and crossing out on the flyleaf the stuff that hadn't held up, then highlighting in the new one.
I kept up this practice until the time when I went back and realised that nothing I'd written served me or felt true any longer. I felt at that point that I'd used that tool the way it had been meant to be used at the time, and that it had finished out its purpose.
I still have them, I doubt I'll reread them. But they were a great gift to me for several years in a way that I don't think anything else could have been.
They were there when you needed them. That's the important part.