I neglect to journal regularly at my own peril. Having conditioned my mind to use this process to think things through more thoroughly than I am otherwise able. Also knowing that most of the important realizations I have about what is going on with me, physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, come as a gift from this endeavor. Insight and hard truth. Awareness of irony. Appreciation for the subtleties I miss in my grosser conscious meanderings. Exploration and digression into unexpected terrain. Push and pull of emergent notions. Birthing of ideas. Elaborations. Refinements. Exposure of my own intellectual fraud. These and more. Writing is, for me, an essential endeavor. No longer optional, or whimsical, but elemental to the life I am engaged in living.