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Forgettings

Looking back through my old notebooks, I find that many of the thoughts sketched in them are forgotten for years, and then revived and reworked as new. I suspect that such forgettings occur for everyone, and they may be especially common in those who write or paint or compose, for creativity may require such forgettings, in order that one’s memories and ideas can be born again and seen in new contexts and perspectives. -Oliver Sacks

I recently came across a journal I had been keeping when I was on an international exchange as a teenager.  It was more than a little eerie reading my younger inner thoughts, but I knew as I read them that that same voice is inside me now. Perhaps the voice has dropped an octave, is a tad less questioning and hesitant, more critical, and has become a bit more seasoned, but the questions and the doubts are all still familiar old friends.

 I also came across a number of quotes in there that I had already started choosing to use on this blog.  It made me think that I have been on the same thinking path for a long while and words that resonanted with me then continue to do so, but are understood in vastly different ways.

 Not long after I started blogging, this journal leapt to mind.  I remember taking copious notes of things I was reading so that I could write them into letters to friends or just hold onto.  When I started writing a blog, I remember thinking, if only I could find that journal because that's where this all began.

 However, there was a very long pause in between those two steps. A seventeen year one, in fact.  However, the forgettings have been revived and those ideas have come up for air and sunlight and consideration again.

 "A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song." Maya Angelou

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