I've heard a lot about "reflection" during my time as a student, especially since coming to college. In every class I've taken here, I've been asked by my professor at least once during the semester to reflect. Reflect on a reading assignment, on my experience in a group project, on a speech or presentation I gave, on an extracurricular event I attended, etc.
With so many assignments asking me to reflect, I'll admit, I've forgotten the purpose of reflection on more than one occasion. I'm sure you can relate, when you decide to just go through the motions for an assignment and mechanically write what you know your teacher wants to hear.
But as cheesy as it sounds, I've discovered that reflection is actually one of the best ways to learn new things and grow into a better person. "A man is but the product of his thoughts; what he thinks, he becomes," Ghandi said.
Reflection can seem like a chore when it has been assigned, but the key to successful reflection is authenticity – reflecting on your own terms, for your own benefit. I started keeping a journal when I was a freshman in high school, and it was one of the best decisions I've ever made.
I know a lot of people have trouble sitting down with a pen and a piece of paper and writing. I do, too. Sometimes your hand isn't fast enough to keep up with your thoughts, so what you write down ends up falling short of what is actually happening in your mind.
The best way that I've found to counteract this is to not write at all, but rather to type.
I type my journal on an Internet blog with the privacy options set so that only I can read it. Typing, for me, is infinitely more efficient than writing by hand. If you're a slow typist, this is just another incentive to improve your typing skills — if you can train your fingers to keep up with your thoughts on a keyboard, your writing becomes much more genuine and realistic-sounding.
I've written at least five entries per month in my online journal since around the end of 2006. At first, the entries were short and barely scratched the surface of my thoughts. I hadn't yet grown comfortable enough with a keyboard to convey the full extent of what was happening in my mind. But as the months passed, I found myself typing more and more, and now each new entry takes me at least 30 minutes to write.
You might not think you have enough happening in your life, or even your mind, to sit down and write for 30 minutes on a regular basis. But I think you'd be surprised. Once you get used to spilling your guts onto a computer screen, especially with the knowledge that you're the only person who will ever read what you write, it almost becomes second nature. It becomes a way to reflect on what is happening in your life and work out problems that you might not even realize exist.
Today, I can't imagine my life without the opportunity to reflect on it with words and then re-read what I write. I have a written record of what I was feeling for all four years of high school, and one day, I'll be able to say the same thing about college.
Even though I haven't even been out of high school for a whole year yet, it has already proven to be an incredibly useful tool to be able to look back at what I wrote, to pick any given month in any given year since I started writing and to compare the person I am today with the person I was then. It can be encouraging to see how much I've learned in such a short period of time.
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More than believe, I know for a fact that everyone could benefit from keeping a journal. It's a reminder to live in the present, and to live purposefully. When you know that you're going to sit down and write soon, you'll find yourself wanting to have done something worth writing about — something that you'll enjoy reading a few years down the line.
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