This Habit Will Change Your Life (And It’s Really, Really Easy)

I know everything that happened for two weeks of my life when I was eleven.

OK, not everything. I know that I went to Girl Scout camp and ate a “walking salad”; that my uncles got married and I met a nice girl named Elisa at their wedding; I saw the movie “Hercules” in the theater; and “we started to go to a beautiful swimming pool, but they charged us $60 so we didn’t go.”

I know this because for my birthday in 1997, my grandmother gave me an elegant gold-plated, leather-bound page-a-day diary, with the pages pre-dated, and as an eleven-year-old I was able to keep up the habit of writing my observations down once per day for two entire weeks. Which, let’s be honest, is quite a triumph for an eleven-year-old with undiagnosed ADD.

But I remember the frustrations I had when I kept this diary. The pages were small. I like writing long, scrawling diatribes, and this page-a-day journal only afforded me a paragraph or two, even if I made my handwriting tiny. In the month of July, when this diary was active, I wasn’t having a lot of longings about boys or friends or anything; the summer was starting to get stretchy and deep, and mostly I was waiting to have feelings. The very final entry in this diary is from July 17, and it says, “I’ve got a new thinking subject! 6th grade. I hope Fontaine…