Two hundred and forty-six pages

There is a grey guided journal on my shelf that I wrote in, on and off, for four and a half years. The last entry is dated June 17th, 2025. Page 246.

The last prompt I answered asked me what three things I was grateful for. The morning sunshine. The wisdom other people leave behind in books. And waking up from my endless list of to-do's.

Then nothing. I didn't finish the entry. I closed the book the way I had a hundred times before, and I never opened it again.

I didn't know it was the last one. You never do.

It was a gift from my mom, for my birthday. I was turning twenty-nine. My first entry is dated January 16th, 2021.

Black lettering on the cover. Six questions a day, three in the morning and three at night. A weekly reflection, a monthly one, pages at the end of each week for notes and ideas.

I know why she chose it. My mom and I spent my whole childhood talking. Not small talk. The long kind, where you work something out in front of another person and they hand it back to you slightly changed. She gave me a book of questions because she knew I liked being asked.

The words “on and off” is doing a lot of work in that first sentence. I would go for weeks, sometimes months, writing every morning and every evening. Then I would get saturated. The same six questions, in the same order, asking the same things. I would drift to one of the blank journals on my shelf, or buy a new one, which is a small ritual I have never grown out of. Time would pass. Then I would come back.

That happened more times than I can count. Two hundred and forty-six pages accumulated that way, in stretches.

The last stretch ran about three months, right through to June 17th, 2025. By the end of it I had had enough. That had happened plenty of times before. This time I didn't come back.

I have a lot of affection for that book. It taught me guided journaling. It held years of my life that I would otherwise have lost. But every time I set it down, I set it down for the same reason. It had stopped asking me anything I wanted to answer.

Years before any of this, I was volunteering as a night manager at a surf hostel in Raglan, on the west coast of New Zealand.

Buses came every couple of days. Sometimes one person got off. Sometimes a hundred and twenty. And every single time, the same conversation.

Who are you? What are your plans here? Where have you come from? Where are you going next?

Good questions, all of them. Plenty of people get a great deal out of them, and so did I, for a while. But after a few months they had worn into a script, and everyone answered on autopilot, including me.

That hostel gave me some of the best connections I made anywhere in my travels. Which is exactly why the script started to bother me. I could feel how much was sitting just underneath it.

So I started asking other things.

If you could go to the furthest edge of the universe or the deepest part of the ocean, which would you choose, and why? If you had to be a Spice Girl, which one would you be?

They sound like nothing, but they worked immediately. People would stop, actually think, and then tell me something true. Whole evenings opened out of a question about the ocean.

I wasn't being clever about it. I was tired of small talk, and I wanted a real conversation.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to notice I had done the same thing twice.

Because that is exactly what was happening at my desk. The six questions were not bad questions. They were finished. They had asked me everything they were going to ask, and they kept asking it anyway, and I kept answering on autopilot until I couldn't.

I open my entries with “Good morning Austin.” I always have. I write to myself the way you write to a friend, and then I answer back. Journaling has never been a record for me. It is a dialogue, and a dialogue only works when the other side is curious.

So I wrote the questions I actually wanted to answer. Three for the morning, three for the evening, alongside the six that were already there. I laid the whole thing out as a journal, found a printer in the Netherlands, and had a single copy made for myself, mostly to see what would happen.

What happened was that the page felt interested in me again.

None of this arrived at a desk on one particular afternoon. It came together slowly, out of a lot of years and a lot of ordinary mornings and evenings.

Noticing what you actually feel. Naming what actually matters to you. Telling the difference between a life you chose and one you drifted into. None of that is a temperament. It is not something you either have or you don't. It is a skill, and skills get better when you practise them, and that practice needs a good question far more than it needs discipline.

That third gratitude on page 246, about waking up from the endless list of to-do's, shows up across years of my journals, in different handwriting and different books. It is the thing I am always writing my way out of. A form will not get you out of it. A form takes your answer and files it.

So I built the journal I wanted next. Twenty-eight days, seven themes, a different question every morning and every evening, so the book stays curious for as long as you do.

I still have the grey one. It is on the shelf, an arm's length from where I am writing this, and I am not getting rid of it. It gave me years. It also gave me the exact frustration I needed.

The difference I was after is a small one, and it took me two hundred and forty-six pages to be able to say it plainly.

A form waits for you to fill it in. A conversation wants to know what you'll say.

---