Why Write the Same Day Twice?

Those who are ready to die will live. These words of Yi Sun-sin, from the eve of the Battle of Myeongnyang, are not in the first diary entry for that day.

He wrote that same day again. Why would he?

On a hard day, do you pour it all out, or press it down and steady yourself?

A general who wrote down even his weeping. The old emperor in the film Gladiator was a real man: Marcus Aurelius. He wrote: add nothing more to what happened.

Set the two diaries side by side, and you'll find a clue to who was right.

First, let's look at the day he wrote down even his weeping.

Released from prison, he was heading south, stripped of any rank. His mother was on her way to him by boat.

The boat came in. His mother had already breathed her last on board.

About 1,850 years ago, by the Danube. A Roman emperor at war writes to himself.

One man wrote down his weeping. The other wrote down, in advance, what he would say.

Yi Sun-sin. The commander who led Joseon's navy during the Imjin War, when Japan invaded Korea. This diary, which he wrote on the battlefield, would later be inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register.

Aurelius left behind the Meditations. Scholars generally take the view that it was not written for others to see.

This is an imagined meeting, woven from the writings of two men who never met. First question. On the day you fall apart, what should you write?

The emperor's way of steadying himself was not pressing everything down. Even when what happens is out of my hands, the judgment I attach to it is in my hands.

Pour it out, or steady yourself? In the autumn of that year, Yi Sun-sin's diary falls apart even further.

About a month after his victory at Myeongnyang, a letter comes from home.

On the envelope, two characters: "Bitter weeping." His youngest son, Myeon, had been killed in battle.

His diary, two days later: unable even to weep aloud as he wished, he went to the house of a salt-maker.

One man had nowhere he could even weep freely. The other wrote that the place to withdraw to was within himself.

In Yi Sun-sin's weeping there was a question: how could the order of things be so broken? The emperor repeatedly wrote that everything happens according to the nature of the whole.

Second question. Why did he write the same day twice?

From August to October 1597. A little over two months of the diary overlap across two volumes. Why he wrote it again is not recorded anywhere.

The first version of the eve of Myeongnyang is short. "Went to the waters off Usuyeong and stayed the night. Many strange omens in my dreams."

The same day, written again, becomes a scene in which he calls his captains together.

These were not words Yi Sun-sin made up. They are a passage from an old book on the art of war. In the rewritten diary, he set that passage down as the pledge he made to his captains that day.

This is as far as the record takes us. The fact that he wrote it twice, we'll keep as the last key of this game.

This is how the emperor wrote himself little scoldings. So that the throne would not dye him.

Those who are ready to die will live. These words, at least, are in Yi Sun-sin's writing. But among the sayings known as theirs, there are also words that are not in their writings.

There is a saying attributed to Japan's Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō: "You may compare me to Britain's Nelson, but not to Yi Sun-sin." No record of Tōgō actually saying this has been found so far.

"I, your servant, still have twelve ships." These words are not in the diary either. They come down to us, undated, in an account of Yi Sun-sin's life written later by his nephew.

"Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, they will not care how devout you have been, but how you have lived." These lines, passed around as a quote from Marcus Aurelius, are nowhere in the Meditations.

That is why what a person left behind in their own writing is precious. It is there that what they really thought stays closest to us.

The general who poured it out, and the emperor who steadied himself. And yet the two of them had one thing in common.

The night he heard of his son's death. Even that day's entry ends with the words that rain began late at night. From the next day on, beside the weeping, he writes again of wind and rain, of ships, of his captains' affairs.

The emperor wrote this, too: a few short, fundamental principles are enough. Enough to send himself back, without resentment, to the work he returns to.

Both men, once the writing was done, had a battlefield they had to go back to.

Then were writing that pours out and writing that steadies really two different paths?

So: seeing yourself from the outside. Can science confirm it too?

The ability to step back and watch yourself thinking. Psychology calls this metacognition.

A study from 2014. Picturing the same kind of quarrel, people reasoned more wisely when it was a friend's. When it was their own, less so. But when they were asked to look at their own as if from a distance, like someone else's, the gap disappeared.

Another experiment the same year. People about to give a nerve-racking speech. They were asked to reflect on themselves using their own name or "you" instead of "I." Those who did got higher scores from the evaluators. And after the speech, they felt less shame.

It is like the emperor, who called himself "you" as he wrote himself scoldings. But these studies were short experiments lasting a few minutes. It does not mean that a diary is a cure.

Writing that pours out, and writing that steadies. How do you see it?

From here on, this is not fact or interpretation, but my own view.

The two are not different at all. For some people, every single day is one battlefield after another; so all that differs is how hard, and how often, they must steady themselves.

Why are they one? In engineering terms, it's because a diary is the work of looking at yourself objectively, and so raising your metacognition.

When I pour my weeping out onto the page, the weeping inside me becomes letters on paper. In that moment, for the first time, I see myself from the outside. Writing that steadies is speaking to myself from that outside. Yi Sun-sin, who wrote the same day twice. In him, as I see it, both of these happened together.

And we must write on the brief days of peace, too. That is how the blade keeps from going dull.

The emperor wrote something similar: to keep giving himself this retreat inward, constantly, and to renew himself.

The emperor's retreat resembles the strength to embrace the swaying and come back. I'd like to call this strength virtue.

Now AI can sum up your day, and can even write your diary for you.

But trying to look, as deeply as I can, into how I myself think and feel, even into the self beyond my unconscious. That is my part, and it must not be handed over.

So this is my answer. Whether you pour it out or steady yourself, writing is one thing: seeing yourself again from the outside, and setting yourself upright again.

Because even if we can't rewrite what happened, we can rewrite our judgment.

Tonight, try writing just one line. One thing that happened today. And then one line: what you would have told a friend, if it had happened to them.

One last question. Today, what did you steady yourself against? Or what did you need to pour out?