T R A V E L • J O U R N A L: A N • E X P E R I E N C E

      A journal, is a book or a notebook, in which we write our personal experiences and thoughts. As part of a class assignment, we were supposed to keep a Travel Journal. This journal was not our typical "diary". In this Travel Journal, we had to follow a few guidelines, given to us by our professor from the book Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg. We were meant to follow these rules, which were called "The Anti-Rules"; this prompted us to do the following:

1. Keep your hand moving

2. Don't cross out

3. Don't worry about spelling, punctuation or grammar

4. Lose Control

5. Don't think, don't get logical

6. Go for the jugular (which basically means to "go into difficult emotions")

At first, these rules were really hard to follow, specifically rules #2 and #3; at least for me. I'm a person that strikes out misspelled words almost automatically, because I'm what you call a grammar freak. I like my writings and works to be properly written and punctuated, and since we had to write without thinking and just flowing with whatever thoughts popped into our head, these two rules were hard to follow at first. 

     As the weeks passed, these two rules that gave me so much of a hard time to follow, got progressively easier to overrule. I slowly but surely, learned to just ignore my misspelled words, and if I wrote something as it wasn't supposed to be written, I would just stop writing the word, and just keep on writing. Another strategy that I found useful for myself, was that when I would write a word and I knew that it was spelled wrongly, I would write a dash (–) and keep writing after it. This experience was something interesting, since I had never done something like this before. 

      Another part of the journal, was to do an activity where we had to do draw something called a "Life Compass." The drawing is as follows:

As one can see, it's very similar to a normal compass, but instead of North, South, East and West we have S, M, E and P; each letter means spiritual, mental, emotional and physical, respectively. According to what we were feeling in that moment, we would appoint a number with 3 being the maximum and 1 being the lowest to each letter. When all the letters had a number, we would sum all and obtain a total. This was our "number" and with this, as we progressively did more compasses, we could compare the results and see the areas where we had been lowest and try to reflect upon this and try to see if we could make a change so that the numbers went up, instead of down. 

      

      For me, I noted that the days when I obtained the lowest of numbers were the days where I was sleep deprived from staying up until late in the night to study, thus affecting severely the numbers on some compasses. Over all, the experience of the Travel Journal is something I may keep on doing in the future. It really helped me ease my stress over the things that were bugging me on particular days. This experience is something I will encourage some friends to do also, while following the "Anti-rules" because it's like a form of therapy that really helped me relax and keep on going through out the day, and I'm confident it will do the same for my friends. 

Travel Journal: Front Cover

Travel Journal: Back Cover