Hello there,

welcome to my daily journal!

I was inspired to do this after discovering the public journal of DK called Road to Ramen. As of today, May 01, 2021, he has 481 journal entries, which is just insane to me!

I love to write stories; be it fictional stories or my thoughts and travel experiences told as stories. Irrespective of the content itself, I want everything I write about to be part of the novel of my life. And so I often find myself writing about something that is on my mind and expanding it with personal experiences and stories of my past. These are the type of posts I am writing on my blog thelifeofash.

I started that blog back in 2019, when I started my semester abroad in Japan. I committed to writing one post every week about the things I experienced there. This included the travel experiences I had as well as how I felt on the inside about my life there and in general. However, the commitment ran out the moment the semester was over and I went back home. And so, I stopped writing posts for some time. I really enjoyed the process of writing; getting the things that I had in my head onto paper (or in this case onto a screen). This lead me to decide to write consistently again, and so I created this journal.

I tried journaling in the past, but rarely made it past the first week of daily entries. I always thought these journals need to have a specific topic. Maybe a journal about your progress in a hobby or your work or your mental health. However, writing about one specific aspect of your life everyday can get very hard after some time. You could be stuck and not progress for some time, or you shift your focus in life away to something else, and suddenly you don’t have anything to write about anymore. That’s why, this time, I will be writing my journal entries about whatever occupies my mind the most that day. Whatever I want to get out of my head and onto the screen will be the topic of that days journal entry. This way I also ensure I don’t get hung up on something I don’t want to write about.

Another motivation for starting this daily journal was that I often have ideas and thoughts that I want to write about, but which are too unpolished to put on my blog. Often these are ideas that can be further developed into a fully fleshed out post, but that takes time, and I want to write the idea down at that specific moment. So I will also use this blog as a way to note down ideas and thoughts for posts that I would like to write in the future.

Additionally, I think this journal might help me in getting more proficient in writing and in web design. Even if I only write short, informal and not overly edited journal entries, being consistent and writing every day will make me more proficient in writing in general. Also, I can use my daily journal as a playground for experimenting with different writing techniques. This might include using different punctuations, using emojis in text or different formatting of the text (like using bold and italic). I also decided to make the website for this daily journal entirely from scratch. I currently use Jekyllrb for generating the website. However, I’m not using any themes and all code for the website is written by myself. I’ll try to improve the things that I feel like need improvement over time. I already have some improvements in mind, the biggest of which is a search field for filtering the posts. I have never done much web design, so this will be an interesting challenge for myself that I’m looking forward to conquering.

Lastly, I am doing this journal publicly for two reasons. Firstly, I will always feel a certain pressure to write an entry each day. In some way this is similar to having a gym buddy: you motivate each other to show up and do what you promised you would do. Only that my gym buddy is the world wide web. Secondly, I believe that writing ideas and thoughts out and putting them out in the world for the people to read might spark ideas and thoughts in them. I learned a lot from reading blogs of other people; sometimes I even got ideas about what to do next in my own life, like creating this daily journal. I hope that this journal can get you some kind of benefit in your life, be it something you learned, an idea that sparked in your head or some good old entertainment.

So, after many words of introduction, here it is: I will be committing to writing one journal entry every day for at least the next 6 months (until October 31st, 2021). After that time, I will reevaluate the benefits of this journal for my life and decide whether or not I want to extend that commitment. You are welcome to join me in this journey, whether publicly or privately, and try daily journaling for yourself. I’m excited to see how this daily journal adventure will pan out.

See you tomorrow 😊
Ash