Andrew Melder

I take and share a few photos. Recently many of those photos have been by the beach, as I and many others take advantage of the nice weather before winter comes around. I generally don’t like taking photos of people directly, but sometimes the context of the goings on within the community is a nice reference for trying to document how life is like within a specific time period.

However, the viewpoint I’ve been capturing is very much a privileged view of life here. The other, and unfortunately increasingly more common, part of life here in Western Australia is people doing it tough and sleeping rough.

It’s an aspect of life I do not capture because it feels exploitative to photograph those struggling to just survive. But in a State that is full of people who are lucky enough to have (like myself), it also feels slightly shameful to hide and minimise the plight of those who have not.

To be clear, I don’t think photographs are the answer to anything here. I’m just thinking of the bigger picture.

I honestly get overwhelmed thinking on what I as an individual can do to help, beyond the occasional act. As one person it feels like a crisis too big to get close to solving; let alone have the means to assist in any real, lasting way.

The situation is being noticed here. People in Perth are increasingly aware of homelessness and there’s occasionally a local news story highlighting the matter. However the tone of the voices on the subject, particularly by those in positions of both power and influence to make a meaningful difference, is often one expressing frustration at the inconvenience of the homeless on their privileged lives; then dismissal of the issue as someone else’s problem.

I don’t have a solution but it feels like more can be done. Politically though it might be a tough sell to, as an example, provide basic shelter for rough sleepers when there is a cost of living crisis overall and many are doing it tough and often going without meals just to maintain access to a shelter. It would be understandable for those people to feel disadvantaged by such an action just because you are scraping by to afford to live in a place but are barely getting by yourself.

But in a State where there’s no shortage of wealth being displayed or resources to be used, collectively we can do more.

Adapting how I journal to the medium

After I wrote on why I type my daily journal over handwriting, I thought I would challenge myself during March and handwrite my journal everyday instead of using my trusty digital word processor.

After 30 days, I felt slightly more comfortable with the notion of hand writing my journal. And while the long term lessons are probably yet to be determined, there is one key difference I’ve noticed between the two types of journaling.

Stream of consciousness vs deliberate thought journaling

One thing that became very clear to me early on was that I had to change how I wrote in my handwritten journal over my word processed ones: I needed to slow down.

My typed journaling is very much a stream of consciousness given my comfort with typing. It’s not that difficult for me to write the equivalent of a couple of pages of thoughts in the morning without much effort, and it’s fairly easy for me to get into a flow state of writing.

When handwriting I find it more frustrating. While over the course of 30 days I found myself getting more comfortable with handwriting much of that was due to forcing myself to slow down and be more deliberate with my thoughts, and in turn physically slow down my writing.

I see this as being a different kind of journaling: deliberate thoughts versus a stream of consciousness.

Forcing myself to take the time to write a deliberate thought, instead of trying to write as fast as I can to keep up with my mind, resulted in less words on a page for sure. However my main goal of journaling is not to write the most words, but to gather my thoughts and work through things so they aren’t cluttering my brain.

In the end, both methods achieve the same goal just in different ways.

Slowing down the mind through deliberate journaling has its benefits

My mind is very much prone to overthinking things; both a blessing in some scenarios and a curse. One of the other goals of journaling is to just get the clutter out of my head to clear up space for what matters.

Stream of consciousness journaling is one way to achieve this well. However, sometimes if the brain is already working overtime and a bit tired it might not help with actually calming your mind down, despite whatever you end up writing on the page.

More deliberate handwriting of a journal; taking your time and re-writing a word of a sentence just get the thought appropriately documented, can be more useful in calming a manic mind.

So which method am I using moving forward?

The truth is I’m not sure which way I’m going to go.

Using my word processor this morning to write my journal felt a little odd. I found myself wanting to get the tablet to handwrite.

However the other part of the equation is my desire to write more posts and articles about topics and items I enjoy. While I found myself enjoying the handwriting experience, I also found myself not sitting down to write as much outside of my journal time. As I did this morning with drafting this article, my flow sometimes involves moving between my journal file and article file and writing in both in the morning sessions. And I have no desire to handwrite these blog posts.

The other part is I don’t actually do anything yet with the journal notes, handwritten or typed. I back them up since they are all digital, but I have no plans to really use them once they are done. That might change with future technology possibly able to analyse our previous thoughts to get better insights for us to use, so a typed journal would be better for that use case.

In the end, I might try and keep up the handwriting practice for a little longer.

Today has been a little humbling, with some much needed perspective being indirectly provided.

Sometimes we get so caught our own worlds. Focused on the issues in our own little rat race that we lose sight of the importance of what we do have.

Perspective is needed to keep on track emotionally.

It’s not that we must feel grateful (or put a positive spin) for everything in our lives, good or bad. Using perspective, we turn down the amplification of items that may not be going well so we are no longer overwhelmed by them.

Remaining focused on what’s possible to solve our issues, freeing us to take action instead of being paralysed when we catastrophise the scenario.