18. I Wrote That?

J.K. Rowling, in her interview with Oprah said something I found interesting. She said that before she wrote Harry Potter, she couldn't have told you her beliefs, but now that she has written it, she understands better what she believes. I understand what she meant. I have found an understanding as I wrote my personal narrative.

When we were told to pick a memory that taught us something from life, I thought "well, that's it! I can't think of a single memory that taught me something; it took lots of times over the course of years to teach me the lessons I know now." However, as I thought a prayed about it, one memory kept returning: that of Dave on a scraggly old hill in Colorado. This is what I eventually wrote my personal narrative on, as posted below.

When I first thought of that memory, I still wasn't sure exactly what I had learned from that experience, except a special bond with Dave and another song added to my favorites list. However, as I started writing, a lesson took shape, and I realized as I wrote what I had learned from that experience. Thus, I understood better what J. K. Rowling was talking about.

I also had another testimony of this near the beginning of the semester. This is also posted below, but I'd like to focus on a different aspect of it. My first horn lesson, my teacher asked me why I play French Horn. As I thought about that, I felt the urge to write it down. I had recently started blogging more, so I decided to blog about it. You cannot tell as well from the post below, since I edited it to make it less scattered, but you can see the process I went through on the original post here: http://byu-adventure.blogspot.com/ . I wrote that post over the course of five days. As I wrote down my thoughts, they started forming better pictures and lines in my head; they started making more sense. This was one of the strongest testimony-growing experiences I have had in relation to writing.

This idea is one of the reasons I believe we should keep journals. I know not all of us feel less scattered after all our thoughts are on paper, but I know many of us do. Maybe we should try journalling just to clear our heads, sort of like cleaning house every night so when we wake up in the morning, our brain is ready and waiting to fill itself up again with as many ideas as we can throw at it.

My experiences with blogging have given me a firmer resolution to journal in order to make sense of the mess in my head, in order to clean house so I can face tomorrow with a clean house, ready for the crazy children of the day to come in and run wild.