Capturing the diamond dust of our days

Tracking life for 10-20 minutes each day helps in so many bigger ways

Each day, dissolving,

Moments, memories, gone — or —

Saved by bytes and ink

At the start of every year, I vow to do better at capturing the every day of life.

When I do spend a tiny coin of time on recording family adventures, writing down health data, tracking what I’m reading, I see how it makes a difference: I attend to those parts of my life more carefully.

Part of the problem is that today often feels ordinary. What we ate for breakfast, or how much snow fell, or how your pain levels are low this week — it can all seem inconsequential. Today is ordinary, but in the context of a year or decades, each phase is special and patterns emerge.

I often wish I had kept better notes during times when life seemed too busy or too hard for inessential things like journal entries — those were actually transformational times, as it turns out. My first year as a mother. My cancer diagnosis, surgery, and radiation. Our move to Germany.

I have memories, and sometimes lines jotted down, but many of the details, so vivid in that moment of astonishment or glee, worry or exhaustion, are lost.

We can’t go back and excavate those exact thoughts again. We are not that person any longer. We can only do better in the year ahead, in our time remaining.

It’s somehow already February, not the fresh first days of the year. But that’s OK. January gets too much credit as the month to start or start over. Plus, January carries that uncomfortable added pressure to proclaim a resolution and keep it. Something new and important can begin in any month. (Hello, March! Hello, October!)

February is low key. If you don’t have a way to chronicle your days in 2022 yet, why not start now?

What you record about each day depends entirely on you and what you care about. Health, family play, friend time, growth in a hobby, faith, food, art, sports, exercise, the height of your succulents, the birds spotted outside your window, the books read and loved — the options are vast.

Just think of all the amazing bits of stories, wisdom, and data that sift like diamond dust out of our days, blown away and lost forever.

You could capture a singular lovely moment each day. You could follow a particular symptom that has been bothering you. You could write down something your child says each day — the cute, the funny, and the baffling. You could track your weight, blood pressure, or sleep. You could journal about your thoughts in bed as each day comes to a quiet close.

I’m still a novice at this, trying out tools and rhythms. But this year I feel more in the flow. I’m tracking what books I read, fascinating studies I encounter, thoughts on the days ahead, thoughts on the days finished, and health data, like notes from routine doctor’s appointments. I don’t write down every thing every day, but I’m preserving more than usual, holding on to that interesting question or poem rather than letting it float into my mind and then out, like a dandelion disappearing into the breeze.

Here is a short — and incomplete — list of the myriad benefits:

How tracking your daily health, thoughts, and activities is helpful

1. Discover new patterns — When you are recording observations daily, patterns become more visible, both in real time or in retrospect. If you see the pattern you don’t like, you can start to do something about it. For people with a chronic illness, tracking meals, weight, activities, pain levels, and more can help surface clues about what to avoid and what to keep doing.

2. Preserve data about symptoms — Illnesses ebb and flow. New symptoms and their durations are important signals. And it’s not always clear when a new symptom is something alarming or when it will clear up and be forgotten. If you are tracking how you feel, regardless of what it might indicate, you’ll inevitably end up with data you wouldn’t have had otherwise. When the doctor asks, So how long have you had XYZ? you’ll have a better answer than Oh, a while…

3. Shape the future — By writing down what you did today and reflecting, it nudges you more consciously toward what you do tomorrow. Reflecting is a critical component of learning. The blur of life is powerful. Writing for a few minutes each day slows down the landscape enough for you to notice it and think about what’s ahead.

4. Build in a daily rhythm — Tracking can become a marker for the start of your day or the end of your day, a built-in signal to your body. For example, writing in a notebook every night before bed can start to signal to your body that it’s time next for lights out and sleep.

5. Redirect your attention on what’s good — Noticing your daily activities and thoughts helps you cultivate mindfulness, zeroing in your attention on things that are important to you, rather than letting the days blur together, as they are apt to do. It also churns up extra gratitude if you are purposeful about recording and savoring what’s good in your life, rather than expending precious brain energy only on frustrations.

6. Create a book — Capturing the day-to-day can also yield a beloved gift for you and your family or friends. Some journal apps are set up to allow you to easily export entries and their photos into a printed book. (I’ll explain more about this in the next Odyssey email.)

7. Seal the memories — Our human memory is malleable. Our collections of the past change over time. (This is not necessarily a bad thing, as some researchers have pointed out. We modify our understanding of the past to fit what we need in the future.) Whatever you write down today will be different than how you remember it a decade from now. And without jotting it down, you also risk entirely forgetting moments that seem so perfect and crystallized at the time.

I’d really love to hear about what and how you track your life. Write to me at brianne@daybreaknotes.com, and I promise I’ll write back. You can also leave a comment on any post so other readers can get your tip, too.

What the logistics of this record? In the next Odyssey of the Body newsletter, on Wednesday, I’ll share five tools I enjoy using. Three are on paper, and two are digital.

I hope you have a wonderful week of noticing and reflecting.

To our journeys and healthy days ahead,

Brianne