Titling Your Thoughts

This daily blog is not a journal, and yet it kind of is.

It’s not a journal in the traditional sense because if I wrote down my thoughts stream-of-consciousness style, the result would be a jumbled mess. I’m publishing every single post, so that won’t work.

I understand processing your thoughts in this way has value. For me, I do this while meditating every morning. That’s where I let thoughts come and go. Then, when I start typing, I can type with a purpose. Like my meditation practice, this, too, is an acquired habit, and, having been a professional writer for 12 years, it tends to work out well enough.

Hence, every daily blog starts with the seed of an idea and most with a headline, too. The headline frames everything that follows and keeps me on theme. It’s hard to zone in on one idea and deliver it in a way that has some chance of hitting with the reader in 15-30 minutes. But doing this every day keeps me sharp and the audience, no matter how small, at least occasionally entertained.

Despite this, there’s no way to stop being me while writing my blog. The topic I choose for each post is a direct reflection of what’s going on in my life.

If an issue still sits with me after my meditation, for example, I might turn it into a daily blog. It becomes an extension of my mindfulness practice. A vehicle to manage my emotions.

If an event made an impression on me in the few days prior, or there’s a big milestone coming up, those, too, warrant extensive reflection. And though I rarely have enough time to reflect, I get 15 minutes every day to process with a purpose. Another personal matter, another totally qualified subject for a blog post.

Even the seemingly unrelated posts, the ones where I cover a scene from a movie, a page from a book, or a news headline I picked up on, ultimately mirror what’s going on inside my brain and heart. They’re not the most explicit journal entries, but there are bits of me inside them regardless.

One caveat: How far you can carry your journal into a public blog depends on how comfortable you are with sharing what’s going on in your life. I’ve been sharing most of mine publicly for over a decade, so I rarely need to self-censor, and when I do, I can usually find ways to express what I want regardless. Plus, I find on most days, most of what I can authentically talk about is benign in nature. The everyday is rarely spectacular, and that’s a good thing—it keeps my blog steady and engaging without turning it into a rollercoaster.

Journaling your thoughts in real-time is great. If it’s your preferred mindfulness habit, keep at it. But whether you do it as an additional, infrequent exercise or select it as your ultimate daily practice, I encourage you:

Title your thoughts. Whip some of your journal entries into shape. If you shared this personal moment with the world, what would it need to look like to resonate beyond the walls of your own mind?

You might abandon the exercise after a few tries. But you might also find you can have the best of both worlds: a daily quasi-journal and a means to build up a body of work, share your ideas with the world, and, if you’re lucky, find more than a few folks who enjoy reading your words.