Distinction between keeping a Diary, Journaling and Reflection

I remember always owning a book that was called a diary with the year on it. I would buy it at the start of the year and use it write anything from my daily routine, expenses, my planning, to-do lists, thoughts about the day gone by, sometimes my thoughts of a particular event and then other at times use it to vent my feelings. Recently, this book became a digital version and it became more visual as I began capturing photos, videos and audio clips. As years went by, there were many times, I would look back at my entries and realize how much I have grown in my thinking and how much my core has been intact through the years. One powerful thing I began to emerge for me was patterns, I realized what are the common things that brought me joy year after year, time after time and what continued to bring me irritation and pain. It also helped me unravel challenging events and experiences from an observer perspective and this brought a sense of detachment to the actual event. This enabled me move from the unproductive process of brooding and rumination to objectively acknowledging and understanding myself, my reactions and feelings.

Yet, for the longest time, I used the terms — diary, journaling and reflection — very interchangeably.

After jumping into exploring Open learning and Aarohi, I realized an important part of this journey was reflection practice and how to consciously take time for this daily, weekly, monthly and yearly.

This got me thinking of the difference between keeping a diary, journaling and reflection and here is my current thought process –

Keeping a Diary: Recording specific events and experiences as a record of your life.

Journaling: Recording specific events and experiences along with your thoughts, feelings, and emotions.

Reflection: Taking the time to look back on past events and experiences along with the thoughts, emotions and feelings you had at the time, so that you can learn and grow from them.

As I see it, these three live on a spectrum, each building off from the other.

In my limited experience, the more thorough my journaling is, the more meaningful my moments of reflection are. The most important part of journaling is to just do it and the important part of reflection is to ask questions about how we think, feel or respond to situations. Though journaling sounds easy, determination and discipline is very important in the journaling-reflection practice. Curiosity, playfulness and commitment to personal growth are also important while we do this. The more we poke our mind, the more we uncover layers that we did not even realize existed within ourselves.