Ten Minutes Musings

Front Cover: Outer Journey

Write non-stop without lifting the pen from the paper everything that comes to your mind for ten minutes. This was the first project assigned to us in class at the beginning of the semester. The rules were laid out following Natalie Golberg’s anti-rules in “Writing by the bones”: don’t cross out, keep your hand moving, don’t worry about grammar or spelling, don’t think and go straight for the jugular.

The pressure was on. I knew I tend to get the dreaded writer’s block when writing under the pressure of time. Then again, the purpose of this journal was to defeat these black holes that form in our minds at the moment to write.

Once I started writing I noticed that the most difficult part was ignoring the grammatical and spelling errors without crossing them out with my pen. I found myself crossing out the words automatically and then spend a few seconds scolding myself for it. Going straight for the jugular, that is, writing about something in particular was very difficult at first. My mind kept jumping from one random thing to the other without really arriving to a point of thoughts. Nevertheless, the assignment was to write non-stop, so just as my mind jumped from thought to thought, my hand kept writing all these random things in the journal.  With the passing of time, writing in the journal became easier and easier. Grammar no longer bothered me and I could easily ignore the errors and keep writing what I was thinking. Thoughts started to get organized on what I wanted to write about and the writing in my journal started to look more like very short essays instead or a bunch of random sentences. Soon the journal served as a way of retelling something I did that day or even a recording of dreams I have had the previous night.

Back Cover: Inner Journey

Besides the journal entries, we had to make what we called a “Life Compass”. In it we were supposed to rank our mental, spiritual, emotional and physical state from 1-3 (3 being the highest and 1 being the lowest). Reflecting on my compasses, I noticed that while my spiritual and emotional states were very stable, my physical and mental state varied a lot. This variation mostly depended on where I was writing and how was my day. With the exception of a day that I was feeling very sick, my mental and physical states were mostly at the lowest point when I had a stressful week full of homework and exams.

Decorating the journal to reflect my inner and outer journey was an especially fun thing to do. I decided to represent my outer journey on the cover of the journal and the inner journey on the back. To me this was a trip down memory lane. I got to remember past trips all around the world and all the lessons I learned during each of them. The inner journey pictures served as a way to see how much I’ve grown both physically and as a person with goals and dreams to achieve. It also served as a reminder that I am surrounded by a great support group of family and friends that are always there to celebrate my triumphs and help me get through adversities.