Edited by: Nidhi Munot
Orientation week passed by me as quick as a New York cab ignoring your hail. I attended a plethora of meetings, webinars and introductory workshops only to retain half the information thrown at me, and learn the rest as the year went by. The first week of college (albeit online) is a milestone nevertheless. The hustle culture of Ashoka doesn’t spare O-week and it is likely that the week will pass by so fast, you won’t even have time to process that you’ve begun university!
Practices of mindfulness have become much needed as life becomes more fast-paced. It serves your inner peace to be present and savour every moment rather than to just let them pass by you. After researching mindfulness techniques to help start university life off in the right way, I came across the practice of journaling. Journaling is an art that so many successful people swear by and deem as cathartic. I used to journal regularly during primary school too. While today it is fun to read old spelling mistakes—writing “breakfast” as “bokfast”—and to see what I was upto when I was younger, I was skeptical as to how writing down in a book everyday could help me now. As further research for this article and after reading about how people like Oprah and Mandela strongly believed that journaling changed their lives, I had to give my long-lost routine another go.
The fact is that there are so many forms of journaling that it’s hard to decide where to start. There is freewriting, doodling, gratitude journaling, writing letters to yourself, bullet journalling and other possibilities. A helpful quote that I read online was—“Make the journal work for you. Let it be there in whatever capacity you need.” So I set aside spending 20 minutes a day with the intention of documenting whatever my thoughts were at the time with absolutely no judgement. I did not care about my spelling, grammar or handwriting and just let my hand move the way my mind told it to—even if it meant just writing ‘I don’t know what to write’ ten times in a row. The rationale behind writing whatever comes to mind is that when you’re in touch with your thoughts, you begin to understand yourself, your patterns, and your behaviours. With practice, cloudy thinking will give way for clarity and journals will become a safe space for not only pointless venting but also for giving yourself solutions.
As I went about trying to inculcate journaling into my daily routine, I realized that one of the reasons I had put it off for so many years was because I found that my thoughts used to outpace my writing. This used to frustrate me to the point of just stopping. My new set purpose of no-judgement however, helped me overcome my recurrent need to justify my own thoughts, making my writing easier to match the pace of my thoughts. I also made a promise to myself not to read what I had previously written in the hope of further acceptance that my life is fully in the present and that the past is over.
I guess everyone’s experience of journaling will be different, but setting off with the aim of getting to know yourself, your likes and dislikes and just spending time with yourself makes it easier to accept you for you. When you write about what you’re grateful for, your troubles and your day, you tend to process events rather than carrying those skeletons into the next day. This not only makes the journey lighter, but also much less overwhelming because you’re mindfully reflecting on each moment. I think we could all use a little stress-buster during the hectic schedule of O-week.
Starting off/reuniting with a mindfulness practice such as journaling along with the start of the semester are both like turning a new page in life (literally and figuratively). This act of being present goes far beyond just documenting your day. It is the art of mindfully savouring and defining moments in your memory. I believe that this practice can not only guide upcoming freshers with Orientation week but also help the rest of the semester be a much more rewarding experience. It can aid in feeling put together, and honestly, there’s no better way to start off a new academic year than being in the right headspace. It’s probably no coincidence that ‘journal’ and ‘journey’ have the same root.