I sit next to my laptop on my lunch break as I’m working from home. I’ve decided to use this break to work through some Hope*Writers teachings, as I’m longing to bring back my pre-Corona writing habits. I’ll use this little window of opportunity intentionally instead of scrolling instagram. I am so mature.

I choose to listen to a teaching from Jonathan Rogers on habits. I love talking about habits, even when they’re hard to form or easy to lose. I shared a few of my own earlier this year, a few that certainly vanished when the world got all shaken up. In his teaching, Rogers talks about someone he knew who wrote what they ate on a tiny calendar every day. It was a small calendar with just enough room to pencil in those meals. It wasn’t elaborate — no filet mignon or lobster. They simply wrote in “peas” on the day they had peas. 

I’m listening to this as I eat a fresh tomato sandwich. The bread is toasted and the tomato is freshly picked from my father-in-law’s garden. It’s not an elaborate meal either, but it does carry some weight. First, I’m thrilled to be gifted fresh tomatoes. The only time I’ve tried to grow tomatoes myself, they floated away in the flood, right after I planted them. I also love that my new in-laws plant a garden and I love even more that they share their harvest. 

More importantly though, this tomato sandwich makes me think of my childhood. I don’t know where we got fresh tomatoes from back then, but I remember having them. I remember my mom frying up bacon for BLTs and on simpler days, it was just some slices of tomato between two slices of white bread. I’ve never eaten mayo, so my tomato sandwiches are always incredibly simple — just tomato and bread. It never seems to work as well with tomatoes from the store. There’s something about them being hand-picked from a local garden that makes all the difference. 

The instructor goes on about journaling and how it’s the little things from our daily lives that we’d like to be able to look back on later. It shocks people to hear that I’ve always struggled to write in a journal. Maybe it’s that I work to be too thorough or profound. Maybe I feel it has to be too prolific. When/if I look back years from now, I’ll really just want to see little glimpses into what life was like back then. It seems very simple now. 

Forty year old Pamela won’t really care what I thought about the world as a whole at 34. Instead, I might like to read about this stormy Monday at home where I enjoyed a fresh tomato sandwich. Just me, my laptop, and the sound of rain outside. 

I think about the stage of life that I’m in, one filled with changes and transition, and I think — I’d like to look back on some of these things. Maybe this journal would be filled with little milestones, like the first time Olivia says “I love you too” or the day we made our first blackberry cobbler from the Magnolia Ridge blackberries. Maybe my problem with journaling has been that I feel the need to be too detailed. Maybe I just need to jot down a big win for the day or a little thing that I might like to remember. Maybe I need to think of it as less of a place to keep all of my thoughts and feelings, and more of a place to stash little memories for safe keeping.

Maybe, right now I don’t write about where I stand on world politics or life-changing realizations, and instead, I write about fresh tomato sandwiches.