Day 11: Green

"The unexamined life is not worth living"

-Socrates

 Today calls for something green and I found my work journal which is green. This journal was given to me one of my first days here with no specific direction. I decided to start using to record my experiences as an AmeriCorps VISTA. It helps me process and reflect on my emotions in this job. As John Dewey said, "Reflection is the reconstruction and reorganization of experience which adds meaning to that experience." Without this journal recording the highs and lows, I could fall into the trap of just thinking this is an office job; I could forget that the work I am doing has meaning.

“What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.”
-Virginia Woolf

I don't really go back and read my notes and thoughts very often, but I do use tabs to mark pages where I worte something that could be useful in the future. I also don't have a particular purpose for the journal. Some days I throw in my to-do list for the next day. Some days I write a full page while others I write only a sentence or two. Some days are my emotions, and others are full of quotes and research. I try to reflect a little bit each day without feeling the need to record every detail of my day.

So there's my something green. Hopefully this journal helps me grow like a little green plant. (too cheesy?)

-Granny Eyre