Keep a Journal

Daily writing prompt
Share a lesson you wish you had learned earlier in life.

Time moves so fast. And your memory fades over time. The details of your life, over time, become less and less easy to recall. One of my friends became an author. She has kept a journal her entire life, which was very helpful to her when she wrote her first book. I just wish I had kept a record of all of our family experiences when our children were young. It would be fun to share those memories with our adult daughters and our grandchildren now. Also, it would be good to have something in writing to solve disputes when my husband and I are discussing past experiences from our separate perspectives and aging memories. Yep. Keep a journal! 🙂

Hobby? Too Much of a Good Thing? Or Escape From Reality?

Finding a geocache in the woods

Geocaching is something new to me that I only recently learned about. My daughter and son-in-law found one when out hiking an easy trail while out camping near a lake last year.

This week, a friend was talking about her husband and that he likes to hunt for geocaches. He has been involved with this hobby for many years. She expressed a bit of frustration when sharing with me that he is a top geocacher. He has found at least 50,000 geocaches! Fifty thousand! That is a lot of time spent outdoors searching for a small box with or without some tiny trinket or toy, as well as a pen or pencil and paper on which to leave a signature, as proof of his discovery.

The geocacher’s wife, said he walks with arm crutches. He has multiple cancers he is fighting. He has had all of the treatments available for his cancers. Now it’s a matter of time. Agent orange. Like covid, it is a thief.

Our patient worries about him out there searching for these geocaches. Alone. She wishes he would spend more time at home doing things that “matter.” I thought about all of the time effort and money he has spent on doing this hobby of searching for boxes with notepads where he has left his signature over 50 thousand times. My guess is, he has had some interesting moments out there by himself or with a buddy hiking in the outdoors, maybe appreciating God’s creations along the way. Journaling or blogging would have been a great place for him to share his ponderings and experiences.

I wonder if his wife ever went with him. I wonder if he every invited her to go along. They could have shared some wonderful moments of conversation, candid photos, and laughing together. Did I mention he is in his 70’s? I bet he has some great stories to tell.