The concept of the ideal-self fascinates me. I think there's an inherent image contained within all of us that represents ourselves at our best. The you that wakes up out of bed and immediately steps outside onto the dewy grass, letting the blades caress the crevices between your toes while you listen to the birds and praise existence. The you that adequately tends to your health, ensuring your cardiovascular system is healthy and your body is mobile and free of any constraining tensions. The you that reads captivating and wise fiction, the you that reads philosophy and learns how to apply reason to your decisions. The you that periodically analyzes your own beliefs and scrutinizes your patterns of behaviour as to ensure you don't become ensnared by habit and ritual. The you that consistently exerts a commendable effort in anything you do and relishes in just that, the raw effort.
Our ideal selves may individually differ in the content but I think the context remains the same. The general route-to-reward involves the same tactic: journaling. I think journaling is a universally effective tool that assists in the pursuit of whatever our ideal selves would do. The journal not only records what you've thought but serves as a reminder of who you were when you wrote that, what your ambitions were and who you wanted to become. It holds you accountable for your intentions, whereas ordinarily you could dismiss them if they weren't written down. Perhaps the most beneficial and humbling element of the journal is the reflection; peering into the past and cognitively gazing at your previous self, feeling the remnants of your old self and relishing in the progress.
A journal, regardless of the form it assumes, is an extension of our internal cognition. It becomes the content of our brain; the intentions, thoughts and actions we experience internally are transmitted to an external extension of ourselves. If someone were to pick up your journal, open it and begin reading it, they'd discover at least a portion of the contents of what's internally capsulated within your mind. Now this is a riveting concept.
Let's assume you kept journals for every minor and major goal you had in life. Every little task that needed to be completed, you first journaled about completing and contemplated the most effective or satisfying means of doing so. Including mundane things like vacuuming, arranging items in your room, what you wanted for breakfast. In the journal you’d reason about things and occasionally rant about how difficult it is to vacuum that one corner in your room behind your bed, how your pet instinctively avoids the vacuum by sitting high on your desk, monitoring the vacuum incessantly. If you had a treasure trove of these journals and left them in your attic or stored them in your closet, you'd have a vault containing the experiences of yourself. An extended source of all that is you, your feelings on things, your reasoning for things, your activities, your goals, etc..
This could feasibly become the most valuable source of connection for your progeny once you're deceased. Imagine leaving your children with a vault of your experiences, with journals that revealed your goals and the subsequent journals that had you reflecting on the accomplishment of these goals. For a temporal creature, aware of the inevitability of time, this is a mighty and influential bequeathment.
