handwritten or typewritten journaling

I might say that handwritten journals excel at rereading. Holding an object that is an evidence of time, an example of craft, and a symbol of personal dedication is a joy. Moreover, flipping through pages is still more intuitive and physical than moving your fingertips over a glass screen. One thing I miss about bound book journals is the opportunity to indulge in marginalia. A pencil and a wide enough page margin open up an extra layer that I can use for creative symbology, making unique pictorial signs, or just practicing straight lines. However, while this is fun, paper notebook lose points in security and portability. Using one also narrows my toolset for recall, intention reinforcement, patterns recognition, construct making, and synthes writing.

Both hand- and type-written words will still be there years later, yielding me another opportunity to experience the moment in which they were written. A page with old screebles seen with new eyes could be further sensible. I don’t know much about graphology. Rather, I imagine a body that had knowledge and emotions that have passed since. The body in space and time moved a hand that held a pencil, forming unique figures in ink.

Today I only type. Because it is a fixed aspect of my psychology to think very fast, I learned rapid keyboarding at a young age. I tend to travel far from the initial writing intention, instead of reinforcing it with redundancies, and text workflow makes it easy to split, merge, and further refactor entries. I’ve already tried to slow down in the past, switching to ink- and e-pencils. I still committed to freewriting new notes regularly, but I lost the capacity to review old and form associations seamlessly. Identifying patterns is much easier done in a manner of digital retrospection, i.e. search box. I still like to play with my tablet, now and then, testing out confluent ideas for atomized journaling, holding on to my “pencil aspirations”.