(This is part of an ongoing series of highlights from past Listen to Life newsletters.  Many readers and subscribers were not following when this came out.  Enjoy.)

They appear in blue and black inks, and in the dark gray of graphite.  My words from the past six years fill journal after journal on the shelf above my head.  Other writings are in boxes, on hard drives and in drawers.  Words are scattered all over the place, but the journals on the shelf had my attention for a few minutes this weekend, until they got to be too much to read. They transitioned from enjoyable to burdensome for three reasons.

What is to come from these words from my heart and soul?  Thus, the burden’s reasons:  1. They reminded me of joys and sorrows so deeply placed that the emotions were r i p p e d from me during reading, 2. What is to come of the words after I am gone?  Are they to live on or decay like the paper they are on? And, 3. Six years fit neatly on the shelf and passed with a blink, so what is to come of the next years?

In the questions are the answers, when listened to and listened for.  Life’s fullness comes from the yin and yang of emotions and experiences that fill our lives and make the time pass so quickly.  We owe to ourselves and those who follow to at least try to make record of, and some sense of, our feelings and thoughts.

I’m glad I read my own, personal works.  I learned.  I learned about life, about others and about myself simply by re-reading in the context of the lessons that I have learned between the time that pen touched paper and the time I re-visited them.  Learning is never ending, and our own experiences are among our best teachers on how to deal with love, loss, joy, sorrow, success and failure if we record and listen…to ourselves.