I finished reading Eat Pray Love last night. There's a fascinating premise at the end of the book that really floored me, and now I look at journaling in a whole new way.
At the beginning of the book, Gilbert describes her first conversation with "God." She's on the bathroom floor, bawling her eyes out, trying to decide if she should get out of her marriage because she doesn't want children and her husband does and because she doesn't feel like her life is really hers anymore. She asks for help and guidance. The voice she hears tells her to go back to bed. To face the turmoil that is coming in her future, she needs rest and strength, so going back to bed was the only thing to do.
Later in the book, she describes several instances in which she's writing in her journal and again asking for help. A voice responds back on the page calmly and with empathy. I kept wanting to know who the voice belonged to. God? The Universe? The page itself?
At the end of the book, after the year-long journey that she's made, she muses on how much she has changed, how far forward she has gone, and how she got her life back. She is a stronger and happier person now.
She remembers the woman on the bathroom floor from several years ago. She remembers hearing the voice tell her to go back to bed. She realizes it was her own voice, the one coming from the stronger happier person who made the year-long journey. This was also the voice she was writing to. It was responding with empathy and support because it understood what she was going through - it had been there already. It was the voice of the person she was growing into.
The older I get, the less I believe that time is linear. It makes more sense to me that everything has already happened and is happening and will happen all at once. The perspective of any of your selves as to whether something is past, present, or future simply depends on where that self enters the stream. Do you ever have those moments when you realize that where you are depends on everything happening the way it was supposed to happen, no matter how confusing or painful it was at the time? I do. It's a constant process of growing into a future self.
I've kept a journal off and on since I was a teenager and read Sylvia Plath's journals. I was awed by how she chronicled her life, her views, her questions, and the contents of her head. I was even more awed when I read the unabridged version that was released several years ago because it was even more evident that she fearlessly dove into contents of her head on a regular basis (the unabridged version was easily twice the size of the original, abridged version).
The problem I've always had with journaling was who the reader was. God? The Universe? The page itself? I've sensed there was someone reading what I wrote as I wrote it, but I never could figure out who it was. I tried being deliberate with it - writing specifically to God or the Universe or the page, but it never felt authentic.
Gilbert's idea that you're writing to a future self with fully realized potential works for me. Plath's journals read this way. She understood this idea, although I don't recall that she ever named it as such. It just made sense to her. Even more wonderful is the idea that your future voice can hear you and respond and comfort you and guide you. Julia Cameron says that "God" is an acronym for "good orderly direction." It makes sense to me that a future self, having gone through what your current self is going through, would be the best person to give you good orderly direction. Why not?
This idea also makes me re-evaluate dreams and visualization and meditation. It seems to me those are all ways to contact the future self as well. Dreaming about and visualizing a life you want could be catching a glimpse of a life you have further along the stream, and the image is sent back to you. Meditation is all about clearing the chaos of past and present in your head to let something talk to you that's been trying to get through. And what about creativity? Ideas? Works of art in any medium could already exist, and perhaps in the act of creating, you're sending back a glimpse that is the spark that starts it in your past. Perhaps that's what Michelangelo meant when he said David was always in the marble. All he did was take away the excess to set him free. Michelangelo had a glimpse of the future piece, and that's how he knew what was there already and what he had to do to get to it. It also means that the answer to the question, "how do you know when it's finished?" is that your future self tells you it is. It sends you a glimpse of it that you sense as "this is a complete piece now." And consider people who say "I don't know how, but I just knew this is what I was supposed to do, I just knew this was the person I was supposed to meet, I just knew this was the place I had to go to." They knew because their future selves told them and sent glimpses back.
Conversely, when you're disconnected from this future voice, that's probably when everything feels like it's wrong, and you feel stuck because you have no guiding voice telling you what is next. Happily, though, when you call out for help, the future voice answers, provided you're willing to listen. How nice that it's always willing to re-connect with you, no matter how many times you turn away from it or ignore it. It will always respond to an open heart willing to hear it.
So now I'm curious to see how my journaling changes with this perspective of a future self reading and responding. Imagine the kind of guidance I could get! I wonder how long my future self has been waiting for me to figure this out and make use of her. She must be completely exasperated with me by now. I bet we have a lot of catching up to do.
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