For Christmas this past year, my friend Kayla bought me a book that I had found on Instagram and had instantly wanted to read.

Its title: Chasers of the Light. It was written by guy named Tyler Knott Gregson, a poet, author, and photographer from the mountains of Montana. While browsing in an antique store, he stumbled upon a vintage Remington typewriter. Using a page from a broken $2 book, he typed a poem “without thinking, without planning, and without the ability to revise anything.” He fell in love with the idea of typing with the inability to erase or edit, or with “the uninterrupted stream of thoughts.” The Typewriter Series, which is what this book came from, was a compilation of found paper, blacked-out book pages, or pictures that Gregson has taken, all covered in typewriter poems. The poems range from the subject of love to the subjects of hurt and happiness, and range from the form of free verse to the forms of rhetorical question and even just simple statements.

In the introduction, he states a phrase that crossed me as a definition of myself: “I wrote once that I was a memory keeper, that I was a trapper of time… I am trying to chase the light that I cannot help but see around me.” The book is his pursuit of that light. I read the introduction of this book, and I instantly fell in love with his urgency for life, just as he fell in love with an urgency to record his mind for what it was really like in a particular moment.

I told my friend Kayla that Gregson has the exact same mindset as I do. She said that she read some of the book, and that it reminded her of me.

I’ve always been a killer for documenting things. Photos, to be quite frank. Videos. Messages. Events. Lives. Ever since I read this book, though, I’ve taken on a new mindset. Gregson encouraged me to begin journaling, not to be sappy and not to vent and not to write down every literal part of my life, but to be raw and real about life in a particular moment. Not to learn more about what’s going on around me in other people’s lives, but to learn more about myself as I grow in my faith and in my mentality. It serves as a symbol of positivity to look back to when times aren’t looking up, more importantly, a symbol of positivity that can’t be changed, edited, or revised. When I take on my new mindset towards journaling, it’s just like Gregson’s mindset. It’s my daily reminder that there’ll always be light, in a broken book called life, unedited.

“Find the positivity. Find the grace. Find it and hold it and cling to it like it is your lifeline and only breath of air before everything sinks. Find the silver linings. Hold them in your lungs and search for them in the bubbles and rubble of all that pours down around you. Find the bright spot in the dark clouds, listen for the sounds of the birds when the winds pick up and tear down the house around you. It is there, shhh, it is there, it is always there and it is waiting for you to reach out with both hands, bloody and shaking, and hold tight to it like it is the last thing you will ever learn how to let go. Find the glory, the glory through the ache, and understand that it is what we can endure that defines who we become. That it has never been about the punches we can throw, but the punches we can absorb and still stand up from. It is the standing up, it has always been the standing up and the refusal to lie still and quiet as the numbers count towards ten and the knockout becomes complete. Rise my soul, rise through the flame and the ash, rise through the waters that fill the spaces under your arms as the crawl towards your throat. Rise and find the grace, for it is all around you. Find it. Find the grace.” –Tyler Knott Gregson

My goal for this year is to not only have the mindset of documenting positivity, but also to not let it go. My grandmother always tells me to never let anything or anyone steal my joy, and I’ve definitely began to understand it in full.  As we settle down into 2018, Gregson is right. There’s ache, there’s ash, and there’s dark clouds, but they don’t define us because of the fact that grace is all around us. Whether you’re religious or not, no one will ever be able to take light away from you. Remember that.