As part of MNN’s monthly series, John Wilkerson invites you to give journaling a try in ‘Don’t Kill the Spiders.

When you clean windows for a living, you see the same businesses again and again. Some days you’re working downtown Main Street. Other days you’re in the back recesses of an industrial park, dragging a ladder through an office building or climbing over conveyor belts.

One shop I cleaned was a light fixture dealer. When you walked in, you were hit with the brilliance of a thousand bulbs, all glowing with competing intensity. There were no curtains. Nothing to block the view. At night, the place stayed lit like a beacon. Light fixture stores don’t turn off their lights when the workday ends.

Cleaning the inside glass was easy. The outside was not. The windows were always encrusted with spider silk and bugs. Layers of it. Enough that the business paid a premium to keep the glass clean.

One day I had a new employee working with me. Her job was to clean the window frames after I finished the glass. I didn’t pay much attention at first. Then I noticed her swinging a broom along the side of the building. She was chasing spiders.

The same spiders that had built the webs and caught the bugs I’d just cleaned off the windows. I watched her for a minute longer than necessary.

Something about it didn’t sit right, because if she did a good job, if she cleared every spider from that wall, I knew exactly what would happen. In a few days, maybe a week, those windows would be worse than before.

No spiders. No webs catching bugs. Just bugs, all attracted by the nighttime light, stuck and smeared across the glass with nothing to control them. That was the moment I understood the job. The spiders weren’t the problem. They were part of the system that kept the problem manageable.

When we write, we tend to focus on the window and not the spiders. We want to fill the page with words and feel the joy of knowing our word count mattered. What we tend to forget is that the words may need some help.

Consider the spiders. When you remove them, when you avoid them, when you swat them away, what you’re left with is a page full of surface noise. Random thoughts with nothing holding them in place. When you leave the spiders alone, when you let them stay and even study them, something different happens. They begin to organize your thinking. They catch what matters.

As you think about your own journaling, start looking for the spiders. The thoughts that repeat. The questions that won’t go quiet. The patterns that show up whether you invite them or not.

A question I ask myself repeatedly is this: Am I in front of the wall or behind the wall? The wall is where my mind is thinking from. Am I letting rumination lead my day, or am I stepping forward with mental intent.

Seed your pages with the same questions for a week. Let your answers shift. Let them contradict each other. Let them evolve.

Here are a few of mine:

• What’s the loudest thing in my head?
• Did I speak or write a truth I usually withhold?
• Three things I’m grateful for
• If I could bury one old belief today, what would it be?
• Where did my mind travel today that was fantasy, longing, or fear?
• Three accomplishments for the day
• What’s the next calibrated risk I’ll take?

You don’t need lots of questions or a page full of words. You need the right questions to stay long enough to do their work.

Don’t kill the spiders.