Maybe My Job Is Simply Not to Throw It Away

I woke up in the middle of the night and wrote an article.

Not because I set an alarm. Not because I have some intense content schedule that requires me to sacrifice sleep for the algorithm. I simply woke up, something arrived, and I wanted to write it down.

At this point, I have around 71 published articles on my website. With the ones already scheduled, that number is closer to 73. And sometimes I look at that number and wonder:

What is the point of writing 73 articles?

It sounds like a reasonable question.

Are they bringing in traffic? 

Are they making sales? 

Are people even reading all of them?

But I realized something tonight. If I were being paid every time I published an article, I probably wouldn’t be asking what the point was. The payment would have answered the question for me: I wrote something. I got paid. Therefore, it was worth writing.

But when there isn’t an immediate transaction attached to the work, suddenly the mind wants to know why we’re doing it at all.

And that made me think about journaling.

I Used to Journal and Throw It Away

I’ve journaled for years. A friend once told me that if I turned all my journaling into books, I probably could have published a ridiculous number of them by now.

The thing is, I didn’t keep most of it.

I would write, process, receive whatever I needed from the experience, and eventually throw the journal away. I don’t necessarily regret that. Maybe those journals served exactly the purpose they were meant to serve at the time.

But something has changed.

Recently, I’ve been doing a lot more of my journaling digitally. I speak things out. I document thoughts as they are happening. I explore ideas before I necessarily know what they mean. And because they’re documented, I can return to them.

Sometimes something I journaled weeks ago suddenly becomes relevant to something I’m writing today. Sometimes an idea becomes an article almost immediately. Sometimes several seemingly unrelated reflections begin connecting with one another.

The journal isn’t disappearing anymore. 

It is becoming an archive.

We Don’t Always Know What the Archive Is For

I thought about A Return to Love by Marianne Williamson. The book grew out of her lectures on A Course in Miracles. Something that was originally spoken and taught in one context eventually took another form and reached people far beyond the original room.

But there had to be something to return to. Something had to be recorded, remembered, preserved.

And I think that’s the part I’m beginning to understand about these 73 articles.

I don’t know what they’re going to become. Maybe some of them will eventually become part of a book. Maybe they’ll become teachings. Maybe they’ll lead someone to my work years after I wrote them. Maybe future me will find an old article and realize I had already written the seed of something I am only then ready to create.

Or maybe some of them will simply remain exactly what they are: a record of what I was seeing, questioning, learning, creating, and becoming during a particular season of my life.

I don’t need to know yet.

Not Everything Needs an Immediate Purpose

I think we’re so accustomed to asking what our work is for.

 What is the return? What is the strategy? What will this lead to?

Especially in business, it becomes easy to believe that everything we create should somehow justify itself. An article should rank. A post should perform. An email should convert. An offering should sell.

And yes, those things matter. I’m not pretending they don’t. But perhaps not everything needs to reveal its purpose at the moment it is created.

Sometimes we are simply gathering pieces, leaving breadcrumbs, documenting a life while we’re living it.

I used to journal and throw it away. Now I’m preserving it.

That’s the difference.

I don’t know what will happen to these words in the future. I don’t know whether article number 17 or 43 or 71 will ever become anything beyond what it already is. But it exists. I can return to it. Someone else can find it. The future me can build from it.

Maybe I don’t need to know what the archive will eventually become in order to recognize the value of creating it now.

Maybe my job, for this season, is simply not to throw it away – and that is enough.