Pico Iyer on Journaling

I write—though perhaps it sounds pretentious to say so—to make a clearing in the wilderness, to find out what I care about and what exactly to make of it. Every day so many experiences, feelings, incidents, encounters crash in on us, and every morning I retire to my desk to make a kind of sense of them, to put them into a larger frame, to find out what my priorities should be. It’s like sifting through the shells you’ve collected after a walk along the beach, and it makes for a stillness that lends peace and direction to the day that follows.

Writing reminds you of how much there is in your life that stands outside your explanations. In that way, it’s almost a journey into faith and doubt at once. “The last function of reason is to recognize that there is an infinity of things that surpasses it,” wrote Pascal. He also wrote—and here I could substitute “writing” for “faith”—“In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadow for those who don’t.”
- extracted from Pico Iyer, 'Why I Write,' Publishers Weekly, 2012.