You have to think, okay, you can order the right amount so the customer gets his items earlier, like Amazon Prime and stuff like that, but we're talking about about 100,000, 200,000 items in this mail order company. We've got personality, the delivery time of goods does vary but we are only getting an estimate from our customer that's for about four days from order to delivery. And well, there are a lot of, you see a lot of items, we've got a lot of slow selling goods that's quite hard to predict. And we've got all the returns from the customers, so if you order something, you have, keep in mind, okay, I'm ordering, but I'm getting all the stuff back with some delay, about one, two, three weeks, depends on the product group. Well, that's one case. So, the other one is retail. Let's imagine a supermarket where if you've got some amount of goods which is sold every day, let's say meat, milk, stuff like that, and well, you have to order the correct amount to minimize auto stock situations. Auto stock means your shelf is empty and you have to handle as well as the excess the surplus of goods in the evening because we're dealing here sometimes with expiry dates, we've got weather, we've got seasonality, we've got special events like soccer championship, we take care of everything and we're talking about some hundred items and some hundred locations, so you've got a multiplication here. In the mail order example, you don't have locations, it's only one location. And here you've got, usually you've got fast moving goods here because milk and bread and stuff like that that's sold in amounts about 100 per store. Okay, so what is the essence of this? Okay, you have to know the demand and stocks for certain periods of time in advance and you have to know the frequency of orders. So, well, orders the right amount of items considering the conditions, the boundary conditions, you have to calculate the correct amount of an order. So, well, what do we need in a framework? Well, my talk covers more or less the prediction simulation replenishment module and the testing. Everything else is necessary but I had no time to really put it into the framework. Input output is usually a big deal. We are dealing with companies they have to bring the data to us. Sometimes it's corrupt, sometimes we've got problems with defining interfaces and also output interfaces are quite difficult sometimes. And, well, I just cook it down to CSV files so it's no database and nothing in it, just CSV files. I will talk about predictions but only very, very low level predictions like moving average or rolling mean. And in the replenishment, I will make some assumptions so the calculation is easy and you can follow the formula. Well, in testing I will talk some minutes about pie test and, well, I've written some unit tests for my functions I use in the framework. Well, plotting, logging, documentation, deployment, reporting and monitoring is also very, very important. So keep in mind if you have this list and you think about it then you've got, well, a minimal set for a framework. Okay, for predictions, well, we need to know tomorrow's demand or another period of time, let's say two days, three days in advance and I prepared some easy model examples like take yesterday's sales, take the last week's sales of the same week, well, I left it out. Rolling mean and moving average. You can use gradient boost or whatever you like from scikit-learn. The order calculation. Well, I make some assumptions, okay, we're just, we've got a stock count in the evening of zero so we're throwing everything away each day because it's easier to predict and make an order forecast for items that are thrown away each day so I don't have to do a stock simulation, a complicated one. My demand interval is one day so everything gets delivered after one day. Well, here I've shown, okay, you've got the stock, you know the stock in the evening is zero, you will calculate an order for that. So you know, okay, my order is coming in tomorrow and I've got a demand to fulfill so the customer's happy and well, then the order is the demand tomorrow minus the stock in the evening and the stock in the evening is zero so the order is the demand. Very simple case. Okay, for reasons I'll explain a little later I'm doing a simulation. So I predict the demand for each day on a test sample so I have two cases, take yesterday's demand or I calculate the rolling mean of the last five days and then I calculate the order for a given strategy. For example, take the expectation value of your prediction or more complicated, take a quantile of assumed probability density. So let's say usually you can assume that goods are sold like in a personal distribution or something with more difficult gamma personal distribution and you can calculate this distribution from an expectation value you forecast and then take a quantile of this assumed probability density. Okay, let's switch to a notebook, some simulated data whereas there's a simple data generator available in the repository you can download. It produces data, a time series with a personal distribution between one and 10. You can put in a number of items while I took about 100 items. And, well, let's see. So I'm plotting one product. So that's the whole time series in a histogram where you see, okay, we've got some very low number of zero sales, then you've got about 40 sales of one and so on. And, well, you see the mean is about four here. So that's a personal distribution with a mean of four. And I can plot a time series of this product. It looks like that. Here you see I simulated a time series from 2014 till end of May of 2015. And you can see, well, the sales are fluctuating between, well, four and 10 more or less. And you can plot also the sum of all sales of all products. So I've got about 100 products and the mean is about five. So, well, you see some personal fluctuations each day. You can plot the mean for each product. So my product ID goes from one to 100 and you see, okay, each one has a mean between zero and 10. Okay, well, I've written some demos on simulation where you can do some different strategies like order one, order 10, orders expectation value, orders a quantile, take different predictions. I can show you in a shell, take some time. So the simulation will take about 30 seconds and I'm giving it a config file. You can have a look into this config. It's moving average and I give it a name. Well, the ID is the output name or less here. And it will run. And we can have a look in the configuration file. Well, here I've got some configuration file I'm giving to the program. And now it tells the program, okay, simulate quantiles from 10 to 99 in some steps. Take the model simple prediction, window zero, okay. I show you the code for the prediction. So window zero means nothing here. You've got a start date and an end date for the simulation and the replenishment rule you want to use. So that's what I call strategy simulation code. So it's more or less reading in data frame, takes some arguments and evaluates a prediction function and gives the arguments a prediction function and does the replenishment and calculates what's too much and what's missing and writes it back. So you've got a rate as a result of this calculation for each product and each day. Okay, and the prediction is in here. Well, I took, right now I took the simple prediction. That's just shifted. Well, I've got sales in my data frame and it shifted by zero days because the shift value is also zero I'm putting in and that means, okay, I'm at the evening and I know, okay, I have nothing in stock but I know the last sale, for example, five for this product. So my guess for an order expectation value is five for tomorrow. Okay, so it's, it did run and we got some, call it AVMR here, it's 14.41, yeah. I got a result, we can have a look. Well, we've got index then surplus means, okay, how many items did I have sold and what's left in my stock and it can be bigger than one that means I've ordered more than I sold. It's bad. I've got an auto stock rate that means, okay, how many days has this item been out of stock and it's the mean of all items. So for low quantiles, it's 0.8 here and it's getting bigger quantiles, it's getting quite slow. So you're ordering a lot and but you've got a lot of leftovers. Well, you can do it for every of those combination prediction replenishment and you're getting curves like that. So you've seen the output and well, here I wrote down the definition of access rate and auto stock rate. So surplus amount versus sold amount and item days out of stock versus all items times days combinations. And now you're getting a working curve and depends on the customer, what the customer does want. Well, let's think, okay, I simulated you some expectation values that would be the usual way, okay, we are ordering what has been sold yesterday. Then you're getting a value about, well, auto stock rate about 50% and 25% access rate. But you can do better. We can take the rolling mean, for example, with a window of five and you see this yellowish curve. I hope you can see it and you're getting at the same auto stock rate about 40% you get about 18% access rate. So this strategy would benefit, yeah, your customer would benefit about 6% points lower surplus amount. You can choose the working point for your replenishment solution. You can put it in the config file and while you get a replenishment. Okay, I did this with some parallelization because I didn't write it in a very optimized way. So I thought, okay, I can parallelize it. So it's getting a bit faster and it's quite easy if you use multiprocessing standard library of Python. And well, I've got four cores on this laptop and the result is map of function. The function is the simulation wrapper and I put in a list of values. The list of values are my quantiles. So I parallelize each job is calculated for one given quantile. And our projects of this mail order commonly we're using Redis for calculating it on multiple hosts because we're dealing here with, let's say, so 650,000 products we have to simulate for about 25 quantiles and over time period of 60 days. So it takes about one hour with 90 CPUs and the code is a little bit more complicated and it's a little bit optimized for speed. Okay, testing. Well, you've seen I've got some functions in my code. I've seen the predict functions here, three functions I've got in the simulation. I've got as well some functions. Here I've got the simulation per quantile and I've written some tests and the tests are in tests. Just very simple, assuming some data frame, putting in the data frame the function and testing the result. And I'm using PyTest, just type PyTest and it looks for all the test files in new directory. I've got three, I've got 10 unit tests and they're all passed. And I can put in, I'm using also PyTest coverage. So I can say, okay, give me those two directories and test for how many percent are covered. I think it's out in HTML file. Can have a look into it. So I've tested those two directories, the replenishment and simulation directory and you can see the test coverage is 99%, sounds good. And we can have a look into it and okay, you've got the code and everything's green. So this function has been tested. Well, usually you don't test every case but you can see you can test every function here. So stock simulation is tested in the init files. It's just for importing, there's nothing in it. And the simulation is tested. Well, I didn't test the wrapper. Can see it here, it's red. This function is not tested. So I've got 96% of coverage. One missing, 25 run. And I'm testing also my config. Well, I'm using the Polyptus package on the PyPy server. It's quite nice if you want to test config files. So as I showed you earlier, I've got some config files like the simulation with the diction and I've written a validator while I pass this config first, it's in YAML. And then I'm testing it in the config. The validator right here, it's, okay, I'm loading in importing from Polyptus I'm importing scheme, object, and so on. Look into documentation, it's quite nicely documented. And here I'm defining some lists. So a list of ends for testing my quantiles. And then I've got some check for dates and then here it's a scheme. And I'm testing for the scheme. So the quantiles have to be in between one and 100. Okay, 100 is not in the range. So it's more to 99. And model has to be a string. The window has to be end. Okay, this tool has to be a date with a certain format, year, month, day and an input file with string. Okay, let's test it. I'm going to send the simulation and type a simulation. And nothing happens. Okay, everything's fine. So let's change it. Let's go back, simulation. And I put in a string into the window and run it again. And I got an invalid message. I couldn't put it nice, I really got a nice exception. Okay, here extra keys not allowed in data prediction start date. Oh, why in start date? It's actually, it's before that. Interesting. Sometimes I don't know what's happening. And now it's working. Yeah, now it's in the window. Okay, that was the conflict testing and the pie test. Well, replenishment. Well, it's nearly the same code I use in the simulation. It's just a little bit different. You don't scan over a range of quantiles. You define your working point from the nice curve I showed you earlier. So here I take a 60% quantile. So I hope I'll get an out of stock rate of 33% and excess rate of 23%. So that means in two of, in 66%, so that's two of three days, the customer stands in front of an empty shelf. And customer, well, the grocery store or something like that has to throw away about 23% what he's going to be, what he's selling. So that's quite high, but I'm throwing everything away each evening. So that's really a worst case scenario. Usually you've got in grocery stores, you've expiry dates for a week or two or three days depend on the product. So the code is nearly the same. Let's go into the code. And it's just called order. I've got a model. I've got a prediction model. I've got this replenishment rule. Same as in simulation. And then I'm doing order. And it's predictions. And I apply a lambda on it. But first I'm calculating a prediction. And then I've got the prediction, which is my demand for the next day. And I apply a lambda on it. And it's a replenishment function. And the replenishment function is defined in replenishment rules. So I can give it into the config and let's say, okay, order one, order 10 and what's not good. Order, let's say it's an expectation value of this prediction. Well, it's more of a prediction. And here it's the standard replenishment I'm doing. So I'm taking password distribution, put in the quantile and the prognosis, the forecast for the sales is a lambda. Okay. And well, the order then is just sales minus stock, stock zero and open orders is also zero. Because I'm just ordering for tomorrow, so there's no incoming goods. And then I'm doing a stochastic rounding. So let's run it. So it's just an order for one day. Takes about five seconds, two or three seconds. So I just calculated the orders. And usually you're putting that into a database and then you're putting it on an output file and the customer retrieves the output file and does an automatic order. So that's the optimization. Okay, and the order is just a simple CSV file. Okay, with a date, a product ID, sales plus the truth. Usually you don't know that. And prediction and the order. So my prediction is six. And I'm ordering, I think the 70% quantile. So it's a little bit higher because it's above the mean. And you see, okay, you've got some, can have a look into a file I prepared earlier in a notebook, orders, the order and plot everything into a histogram. You'll see the order is distributed between zero and 17. And the prediction is a little bit lower because I said it's the average. And what's my average order for this day? It's six. So my mean is I'm ordering about six items per order. As some, six, the amount of six per item per day. And while my randomly simulated data has more or less an average of five. So it's not so bad. But what is missing? I didn't talk about logging, but I think it's quite important if you've got a big project, a lot of stuff going on, you want to analyze what's wrong because a system is usually quite stable, but sometimes something happens like a customer sends corrupt data or you've got memory which you didn't expect and stuff like that, and then you need a locker. So everything's covered in the standard library of logging. You can use gray log and everything, something like that to evaluate the logging data. And then reporting, monitoring, plotting is very important because, well, data in CSV files is nice, but I am a visually guy, so it's just, I want to see some plots, some data visualized. And you can use different tools like matplotlib and on top on it, cburn for doing some simple regressions or you use bouquet where we had some talks around here. Okay, documentation is also important. I just wrote down which parameters go into functions as a comment, but you can put good documentation, you can use things. And also if you have got some productive system or testing system you want to deploy code, at the moment I'm using Ansible, so there's a nice talks around here and you can just look into the web pages. While putting it all together, what do we have? We've got a prediction module, a replenishment rules, put together to a replenishment module and we've got a stock simulation which is very, very simple, but it's easy to enhance it and we've got a simulation. And what we also put nice to have is documentation, logging, monitoring, tests and configuration we have or I showed you that and deployment and reporting. Reporting means customer wants daily report of how many items were out of stock, how much was left over in the shelves, what's the average amount of items ordered, stuff like that because usually if you send him the data and he puts it in the database, sometimes it's very hard for our customers to get the data out. So reporting plays a big role in other companies, we don't like too much reporting stuff because it takes time, you have to prepare data and usually we have to look at the data ourselves because it's as a cross chat with our customers so the customer says, okay, the access rate was 12% and we say, okay, we've got monitoring reporting, no, we just made a plot, it's 8.5%, you're doing something wrong and you always have to cross check with your customer because in the real world while simulating is nice but double checking is even better. Okay, well, what do we have? We've got a simple replenishment framework with a basic solution for automated order forecast system in the case of everyday order and everyday replenishment and it's quite simple to put this together with tools, pysons, standard library, pandas and so on and NumPy gives to you and well, what's the lesson? Well, writing Python code is easy and you can use it in everyday life and you can use it to produce real value for companies because throwing away goods or shortening delivery times is very good for our customers and they are quite thankful for us that we are applying them with good prognosis and good forecast, so thank you and visit us at our Blue Yander booth. I hope I see you soon and if you'd like to ask some questions, be free.


In biology and genetics, the germline in a multicellular organism is the population of its bodily cells that are so differentiated or segregated that in the usual processes of reproduction they may pass on their genetic material to the progeny. As a rule this passing on happens via a process of sexual reproduction. Typically it is a process that includes systematic changes to the genetic material, changes that arise during recombination, meiosis and fertilization for example. However, there are many exceptions, including processes and concepts such as various forms of epimixies, autotomy, otimixies, cloning, or parphonogenesis. The cells of the germline commonly are called germ cells. For example, gametes such as the sperm or the egg are part of the germline. So are the cells that divide to produce the gametes, called gametocytes, the cells that produce those, called gamma-tagonia, and all the way back to the zyrgot, the cell from which the individual developed. In sexually reproducing organisms, cells that are not in the germline are called somatic cells. The term refers to all of the cells of body apart from the gametes. According to this viewed mutations, recombinations and other genetic changes in the germline may be passed to offspring, but a change in the somatic cell will not be. This need not apply to somatically reproducing organisms, such as some prithera 6 and many plants. For example, many varieties of citrus, plants in the rosaceae and some in the asteraceae, such as doraxicum produced seeds epimictically when somatic deployed cells displace the ovule or early embryo. In an earlier stage of genetic thinking, the distinction between germline and somatic cell was clear cut. For example, August Weissman proposed and pointed out, the germline cell is immortal in the sense that it is part of a lineage that has reproduced indefinitely since the beginning of life and, barring accident could continue doing so indefinitely. However, it is now known in some detail that this distinction between somatic and germ cells is partly artificial and depends on particular circumstances and internal cellular mechanisms such as telomeres and controls such as the selective application of telomerase in germ cells, stem cells and the like. Not all multicellular organisms differentiate into somatic and germlines, but in the absence of specialized technical human intervention practically all but the simplest multicellular structures do so. In such organisms somatic cells tend to be practically totipotent, and for over a century sponge cells have been known to reassemble into new sponges after having been separated by forcing them through a sieve. Germline can refer to a lineage of cells spanning many generations of individuals. For example, the germline that links any living individual to the hypothetical last universal common ancestor, from which all plants and animals descend.


here we go. So welcome, welcome everyone to our first writer's lunch of 2023. And this topic today is journal writing for the new year. And how journal writing can support your writing practice. Maybe you can't see this, you can't see this look. No, I'm holding a copy of the book. I will put a copy, a link to the book in the chat space so that you can see what the cover looks like and see what the book is all about. But I encourage you to read it. It is a wonderful thing to dip in and out of. The authors have done a great job of curating other writers on the topic of journaling and how journaling is just so wonderful for your mental health and writing practice. I just wanted to ask you again to mute yourselves if you are just joining with us. Because we are recording the event and if you do not want to be seen or heard, please turn off your camera and your mic. All right, steaming through. Welcome again to journal writing for the new year. Our speakers today are Linda Monk and Eric Meisel. And my co-host is Cheryl B. Boutay. Hello. Hello. And they will be talking about their new book, The Great Book of Journaling, how journal writing can support a life of wellness, creativity, meaning, and purpose. And I think in 2023 that is something we are all looking forward to. So to tell you a little bit about Mechanics Institute and this beautiful library that I am sitting in, let's see. First of all, my name is Taryn Edwards and I am one of the librarians here. And Mechanics Institute is an independent membership organization that houses a beautiful library as you can see, which is the oldest in fact designed to serve the general public in California. It is also a cultural event center. We have been hosting talks like this since 1855. And we are also a world-renowned chess club that is the oldest in the United States. We host in-person events as well as virtual fun times like this. I encourage you to consider becoming a member with us. It is only $120 a year. And with that, you get to enjoy all of this and help support our contribution to the literary and cultural world of the San Francisco Bay Area and wider community. Okay, so the Writers' Lunch is a monthly event that happens on the third Friday of the month. And today our speakers include my wonderful co-host again, Cheryl B. Boutet, who is a writer in our community and she regularly offers classes. So keep an eye on our calendar to learn more about what she might be offering next. We also have Eric Meisel, who is a retired family therapist and active creativity coach. He has written over 50 books. I will include a link to his website in the chat space shortly. We also have his co-author Linda Monk, who is a registered social worker, life coach, and the director of the International Association of Journal Writing. So, and I also include her details in the chat space shortly as well. I want to thank all three of you for joining me today. And Cheryl, do you want to say a few words? Oh, I just wanted to welcome all of the people out there in the audience for being with us today. So glad to have you and particularly honored to have Eric and Linda with us. And I do understand that each of them had some brief presentation material they wanted to share with us. So I guess we can start with that. So Linda, would you like to know? Okay, sure. I will dive in. I am going to share my slides. Hi everyone, thanks for being here. I'm just going to do a quick share of some slides because I would love to just say a few things about journaling. Journaling is something that is straightforward. We have a piece of paper and a pen and our computer if you prefer to journal online. And often people are surprised at how many things we can use journaling for in our lives. In our book that Taryn mentioned, we had a number of contributing authors and they all wrote about some different perspectives on journaling, things you can use journaling for like healing trauma and different ways that can support mental health, how we can use it to set goals. And many other topics are in the book, including ways journaling can help us with other writing projects. So I just briefly want to say a little bit about journaling and the difference between private and public writing. So some of you here may already be avid journal writers. Some of you might just be curious about it, how it might support you in 2023 and beyond. Some of you might be writers and maybe you don't journal at all. So I just want to talk about those things and how they can be interconnected. So first of all, I'd like to orient us to what is journal writing. And I love this definition by Kate Thompson. She says that journal writing is the way of finding narrative, constructing story, and of depicting experience and relationships in our lives. And narrative is a way of making sense of experience. And in the fullness of our daily lives, any type of practice that we can turn to over and over again, to make meaning in our lives, to make sense of our experience and be self-reflective has huge value, not just for ourselves, but for our relationships and all aspects of our lives. So I really think of journaling as a personal writing practice. And it's something that can also support other writing that we do. And people generally use journaling for a couple of primary reasons. One is to record the events of their day, that narrative and storytelling. Journaling is a storytelling practice. It's a way of capturing what's important to us and reflecting on that. And it's also often used to vent feelings and emotions. And maybe you yourself have used journaling in that way, just to get what's on the inside out and be able to unload it. Journaling can also be used for transforming our lives. And that's something that our book really tried to capture. And it's something I talk a lot about in our International Association for Journal Writing. How do we use journaling to actually really work with our own minds, our own thoughts and ways that can serve us well? How do we use it to feel the way we want to feel? So for example, we don't just want our journals to be dumping grounds where we put every stress and upset on the page. We can also use them to cultivate joy, for example. If we want to feel more joy, we can write about what brings us joy and of course do those things as well. And if anyone here is trained in cognitive behavioral therapy or the like, we know that what we think impacts how we feel and will impact them how we act. So if we're using our journals to really express our thoughts and feelings, that can have great bearing on the actions and things we choose to do in our life. So it really is a practice that cultivates our personal growth, our wellness, our creativity. And it's a personal practice. Our journal writing is for ourselves. Ideally, we do it in as uncensored way as possible, where we are free to express ourselves honestly and authentically. And we're writing for ourselves. And it doesn't matter about grammar and syntax and other things that when we're writing for other people, do matter. And when we're writing for others, our personal writing can enrich our other writing. So when we're writing for others, there is an audience, there is a reader, all of the elements of writing craft do matter. So I just want to briefly say some of the ways I think journaling can help us as writers. And then I'll stop there just to get us thinking about how journaling can be helpful to our other writing. And then I'll also say how it can help us in 2023, but I'll pause so we can open up for discussion. So in my own writing, I'm currently writing an adopting memoir about my experience of finding my biological roots, including just this week, I recently, after a many year search, have found my biological father and met siblings two nights ago that I didn't quite have. So I'm doing lots of fresh writing. But one of the things is journaling shows us patterns. And we really can get better at noticing what matters most when we reflect on our lives through journaling over and over again, we see patterns, we see what we love, we see the challenges that we might face more than once. And it really helps us see what it is that's mattering to us. It also helps us to craft our point of view. And it's important to have a point of view in life and our relationships and our writing. We really get to see what do we want to say? What what voices emerging on the page? We can reread our journals for raw material for other writing. For example, in my adopting memoir, I was journaling in the moments before I met my birth mother for the first time, which is over 23 years ago now. In my memoir, I would never have been able to capture the raw detail of what was going on in that moment. But because I'm a journal writer, I actually have all of that to mine and work with in the memoir project. And it helps us become a better writer. So if in 2023 you have dreams of writing a book, journaling can really help you do that, because the more writing we do, the better we get at writing. It's like the more we do anything, the better we get at it. So with journaling, I like to think of what are some tips that can help writers as well. And one thing is to remember that whatever we write is right. Journaling is a very empowering act. You are the expert of your own life experience. It can be helpful to date your entries, so that you can find them and orient them through time. You want to write about your thoughts and feelings, not just today I did this and I picked up my kids and I got the groceries. You want to write about more of your inner world, what you're thinking, what you're feeling. And you can journal as a writer. So capture snippets of dialogue, capture what you see, what you're noticing, capture moments. And really write from your heart. You want to use your authentic voice as a writer. And journaling is something that allows us to really keep coming home to our own authenticity, our own inner truth. And that helps us in all areas of our life, including writing. Well, thank you, Linda. That is it. Yeah, stop there. Thank you so much. I'm very, very incisive and I'm sure it's going to prompt a lot of questions. I know it prompted some of me. So Eric, what would you like to tell us? Sure. Great to be here. Thanks for inviting us. I look brighter than usual because I have a new computer, so I hope I'm also smarter than usual. I want to connect up a few dots. When I work with writers as a creativity coach, one of the first things I try to sell them on is the idea of writing in the morning. And if we try to write in the evening, we're too tired by the end of the day, typically. Also, we're a little too blue by the end of the day because we haven't gotten to our real work. So we're a little demoralized by the end of the day. So I think there are lots of reasons to write first thing, but the biggest one for me is that we get to make use of our sleep thinking if we write in the morning. And that's an idea that folks may not understand so well. Everybody knows about dreaming, but they may not know that in other parts of the night, we think. Our brain is really active all night and in REM sleep we dream and non-REM sleep we think. And if we turn our thinking mind over to our book, then our book is available to us first thing in the morning and we can just take dictation. And that's a great bonus for writers to have used all of that sleep thinking time to work on their book. So let me connect that up. So if you were to go to bed with what I call a sleep thinking prompt, that is a question, a wonder. Like it can be a wonder inside the book, like I wonder what Mary wants to say to John in chapter three. Could be that kind of wonder. Or it could be I wonder why I'm having so much trouble completing the book. And let's take that one because that's such a typical problem for writers. They get to the 86% place of their book, but they have trouble finishing it up. So if you go to bed with that sleep thinking prompt, I wonder why I'm having so much trouble finishing my book. Your brain will work on that question. And then, this is the necessary extra part of the process, you then have to turn to that same question when you awaken and then process the night. And that's where the journaling comes in. If you were to open your journal and ask yourself the same question, why am I having so much trouble finishing my novel? You'll have an answer, typically, because your brain has been working on that problem all through the night. So that's one of the ways that journaling can help writers. It can help them solve their problems, whether it's problems inside the book or problems, some kind of process problem. Let me just go on for one more minute. And that is, I teach a focused journal method, taught it to places like Esalen. It's got many steps, but let me just give you the highlights. And that is, you can use your journal to ask yourself a good question. And by a good question, I mean something that's important to you, like why am I having trouble finishing my novel? And then the journaling helps you get to an understanding of why that is. And so let's say that the place you arrive at is that you realize that there's a hard scene you don't want to write. Maybe it's a senior censoring in your own mind or just technically hard to write, but there's a hard scene to write. The next step of the journal method is to tease out an intention. Now you have an understanding. The understanding is, I'm not finishing my book because there's a hard scene to write. Now you tease out the intention. And the intention is, I'm going to write that scene today. That's what an intention sounds like. I'm going to write that scene today or write that scene right now. Or at the worst, I'm going to write that scene tomorrow. So you tease out an intention. And then there are two further steps and then I'll stop. One step is to then align your thoughts with that intention. You want to be thinking the right things that support that intention. So you might think something like, I'm going to do it today. That's a thought that affirms that intention. We need to be saying those kinds of things to ourselves because we're slippery creatures for human beings and we can form an intention and then still go do something else.  So that's all by way of saying all of that work can get done in your journal where you identify some kind of problem you're having with your book and end up with an intention and thoughts that align with the intention and behaviors that align with the intention. And in that way, you can help your writing life through journaling. Great, great, great stuff. Wonderful. I want to pull back just a little bit, Linda and Eric, and ask the question. I wake up in the middle of the night and I write something on a post-it note. Sometimes I send myself emails. Sometimes I leave myself voicemails. Am I journaling? Well, you're working. You're doing the work. I'm not sure how Linda would answer it. I wouldn't think that that's journaling precisely, but I'll let Linda tackle that. Yeah, I think if it's journaling to you, if you feel like it's how you do your journaling practice, then yes, it could be journaling, but it might also just be making a list, staying organized, making sure you don't forget things. So the answer would be yours to answer. Sorry, I'm stepping over you, Linda, but that sounds like thinking. It sounds like your brain's working and you want to make note of what your brain is doing. And for writers, let me just piggyback a tiny bit for writers. We have to be unselfconscious as writers, because if an idea comes to you at the Safeway or at the bus station, you want to feel comfortable pulling out your notebook or whatever you're using and getting that idea down. You don't want to treat your ideas cavalierly. You want them to count and matter. So I think what you're doing is treating your ideas seriously when they come to you. And I think that's great. Yeah. Oh, sorry, Cheryl. Go ahead. You know what I wanted to do is insert that question from Fran, because I think it's a nice time to mention that. Fran asks, while we're talking about brains, she wonders if she's using a different part, if one is using a different part of the brain, when you write by hand versus electronically, and you have a couple of different essays that mention how writing affects the brain and rewrites your thoughts on paper and reformulates it in the brain. Do you have an opinion on what's more effective than what form electronic or on paper than the other? For me, it's about tactics, not so much about better. In working with writers over the years, I've discovered that when they accumulate too many handwritten notes, it's very difficult to move those notes to the computer. It's like its own task and its own burden and its own challenge. So that's not to say that doing it on the computer is better than handwriting, but we do have to be careful of accumulating notes and doing too much handwriting and then having the task of moving it over to the computer. So just on a practical level, on a tactical level, I really suggest to clients that they get especially comfortable working on the computer, comma, just one little comma, and that comma is between projects, I think working in longhand is the most expansive way to be, the most blue sky way to be. So to say that simply, I would work on the computer while I'm working on a book and then go back to handwriting between books. Yeah, and I'll just add that there's a wonderful book called Your Brain on Ink by Deborah Ross and Kay Adams, and it's all about the neuroscience of writing, and there's some great things in there about neuroplasticity. And there has been a study done, I always think the best way when it comes to journaling, and I am talking journaling, not writing a novel here, is to do it in whatever medium will get you doing it. Do it in the way, if you're more natural to use a journal app or to be on your computer because you want a password protected journal, that's fine. If you love, as I do, that pen and paper and sitting down with a cup of tea or coffee or a glass of wine later in the day, and just sitting and having that purposeful pause to go to the page and reflect and have some self-care through journaling, I really do that in my handheld journal because I spend a lot of time on the computer for work as many of us do, and it's just not as relaxing to journal online, and for me personally. So do what works for you when it comes to your journaling practice. And it is interesting to know that a different voice can come out. Many people have said that when they write in their journal on paper, they feel that something different comes than when they're journaling on their computer. So just bring that your own curiosity to that. And the other is, there's apparently some in your dominant hand that you write with, there are acupressure points that connect with emotional centers in the brain. And so in some of this neuroscience work around writing by hand, they talk about that. And because journaling is, you know, you're using it to process your emotions and express your emotions, there can be some support for writing by hand when you're doing that type of reflective work. So those are just some further musings on it. But I recommend that book. And you can look up journaling and neuroscience, you can look up journaling and neuroplasticity, and you'll get all kinds of interesting comments about it and research as well. Great. Wonderful advice. Is there a difference between journaling and recording information in a diary? And how are both used, or can both be used in the writing, in the writing game? Eric or Linda? Yeah, I can dive in. A lot of people don't use the term diary anymore. It seems like journaling sort of taken over more in the language. You know, when I think of a diary writer, it's often that logging of one's life, you know, that dear diary. And we might think back to those little journals we had. I know I had one when I was a young child with the lock and key and it's very private and personal. And I think that, you know, people use whatever language works for them. But journaling in the personal growth space is often seen much more and journaling for mental health, journaling for wellness, that we're going to the page with certain intentions to know, grow, and care for ourselves through writing, through the act of writing. And that may not be the case in a diary. A diary may be more, you know, maybe tracking our stories so we could pass them on as legacy writing to grandchildren or children. It may be more, you know, we think of those in boxes of journals. I was just speaking with someone who inherited their mother's journals when she passed away. And she's learning so much reading the stories of her mother's life.  People also have diaries and it's in the chat, Lisa, using it as a daily calendar, like more like a planner of activities and scheduling. So these, this language, journals, diaries, planners, calendars, they can sometimes, you know, they mean different things to different people. Right. Eric, any thoughts? We look at the real lives of writers. Writers get stuck a lot. They're often resistant to writing on a given day. They often block. These are normal occurrences in the lives of writers. And that's one of the places where journaling can really become important as a tool for self-awareness so that you understand why these things are happening. Freud said that all creative blockage was from self-censorship. And that's an overstatement. But there's truth in that, that a lot of writers are censoring themselves before they get their writing down on the page. They were already afraid of how the writing will be received, worried about criticism or reception in the marketplace and all of those issues that bother writers. And by getting clear on that by journaling, coming to the understanding that that's what's stopping you from doing the work, then you can bravely start doing the work. While we're still defending ourselves and not noticing why we're not doing the work, well, then we're stuck. But as soon as we turn to our journal and start asking ourselves the source of questions I mentioned before and trying our best to come up, to be authentic and come up with real answers for ourselves, not for anyone else, but for ourselves, that allows us to resume the writing, continue the writing. We're talking about for a novel, let's say 300 days of writing, 600 days of writing. There's a lot of time we're investing in this and there are going to be many days where we don't want to do the work. So we have to be as wise as we can be and as self-aware as we can be over that long haul. Very good. Sounds good. It seems that if you have something in mind already that you want to do as a writer or something you want to write, that the journal, journaling can propel you forward for that particular project. So what happens if you don't have anything particularly in mind? Have you had the experience of journaling and then it turns into something that you didn't know it was going to turn into? Yes, all the time. And how does that manifest itself? What actually happens with you and your thought process when you do that? Well, a few things come to mind is in a very practical way in life how I have found journaling has informed decisions I've made in life which wasn't my intent necessarily when I went to the page. So to answer your question has been surprising. So for example, I was living in the interior of British Columbia and I remember in my journal I kept writing about this desire to live near the ocean and it was nowhere near the ocean. And eventually because I saw it in the pages of my journal over and over again I decided to take action on that and at the age of 30 I moved to an island and I've been living there ever since. So there's times our writing can cause us to make decisions that we might not have otherwise made if we wouldn't have seen that inner truth coming on the page over and over again. And in terms of writing I've had times where I'm writing something in my journal and all of a sudden I decide that would make a great personal essay or that would make a great short story and I remember that happened when I was processing a lot of the emotions when I was watching my dad decline with Alzheimer's and now my mom with Alzheimer's there were things that were just in the pages of my journal that then became more public writing things I would write as a blog or you know other things that I would share out with people and that was never the intention when I was writing it in my journal but that took shape because it was you know kind of being crafted there and I've had all kinds of book ideas and article ideas and business ideas course ideas that have definitely emerged from the pages of my journal and I'm sure many of you here who who are journal writers have had that experience too. Great great. If you look at the sure if you look at the journals of well-known writers you see how ideas get elaborated they start from someplace if you think of Camus novel The Stranger for instance and Camus kept notebooks all all of his all all of his adult life and they're very interesting because there'll be notations that say something like the Arab that's all it says but you know that something's percolating and then the next day it's a longer passage about passage about heat and Morocco and the Arab we still he still doesn't know what it's about right it's not not just that we don't know what it's about he still doesn't know what it's about and then the next day it's casual murder or something like that and finally we get to the scene where the main character kills the Arab for no particular reason except it's very hot but but there's been a process there where the writer has been just just percolating with these ideas which don't yet connect but which by him staying with it eventually do connect into art so it's it's it's peeling the onion on your imagination yeah it that's right and it's when we get quiet enough to journal we get quiet enough to do any kind of writing we're essentially reclaiming neurons you know we have billions of neurons but every time we have a small thought like the garden needs weeding we just stole a hundred million neurons from our brain with that little thought right so when when we journal we're getting to that quiet place we feel sort of like emptiness but what it's it's the opposite of emptiness it's the fullness of our brain getting ready for something to percolate up it's like a pregnant emptiness where something's getting ready to percolate up and that's the wonderful place that writers want to get to and that's also the place where many writers so infrequently get to and it makes them feel like they have no good ideas i've worked with so many clients with mfas and what have you who are demoralized and disappointed that they have no good ideas and for me what i always say to them is about not getting quiet enough not about ideas not about talent not about brain power it's that you're a little noisy inside is my hunch and let's just work on getting quieter so it was a long-winded response to that but i think that's what the journaling helps do is helps the writer get really quiet so that ideas can percolate up well let me that brings up another question i have for both of you um we talk about getting quiet inside how do you manage the quiet outside is there a certain physical space that helps you to do journaling in the way that you want to do it have you found that physical space i'm sure linda has a response to that but let me just jump in because i try to have i try to encourage all clients to have a room of their own to have a room of the door and a lock and have a place if they can if they can pull that off we i mean writers write all over i like bus stations bizarrely enough i like to write in bus stations but everybody writes where they like to write but everyone needs that quiet space without intrusions and with agreements in the household where from you know six a.m to seven a.m no one gets to bother you or people can make their own eggs or their own peanut butter sandwiches you you get that hour to yourself so i i think we do need to safeguard our space we need a quiet space all of that's very important thank you linda uh i really do think and we all know there's a difference between internal quiet next external quiet but how they can support each other so for example i have a regular meditation practice that accompanies in in quite often each morning with my journaling practice so i'll start the day and i'll make a coffee and i'll do my meditation and i'll journal and i'll rub my dog's belly but the quieting of the inner mind through the meditation and breath work and intentionally coming into a calm centered space supports me then to go to the page because we all know that when we're more relaxed we're more able to create that's why eric has books on anxiety management techniques for creatives you know there's science on that and getting that amygdala calm down so we can access our creativity and our imaginations and so forth so the external quiet you know i journal all over the place the quiet of the morning in my own home which isn't quiet what's my teenagers get up i love coffee shops for journaling and then there's writing retreats where you get to be in that you know space with other writers but i have found that the more i have cultivated my ability to have that inner quiet the external environment matters less because i can tap into that calm that centeredness that groundedness that quiet no matter the environment i'm in and part of that is working in a home office as well with the bustle of family life you know at the door to be able okay how does one get that that space whether it's a corner a room a moment to listen to them to themselves to their own you know their own voice and hence their hence their writing so i think if people have their ability to calm and within themselves they also can transfer that out and help to calm you know what's going on in the external environment and communicating with people you know when my door shut that's the time people don't come and knock on it unless there's you know some dire emergency we have to protect like Eric said those times for ourselves because no one else will do that for us no one will come along and say oh you really should take 60 minutes of solitude and silence to do your craft we must whether that's journaling or writing a novel or whatever it is um you know we have to carve and claim and honor those places and times and quiet for ourselves and help teach other people how to do that in support of us as well thank you so much we've talked about the internal quiet and the external quiet but there are times that writers need the noise i know when i write poetry i'm usually inspired by something that has happened externally that i have seen or heard or felt so how does that translate into journaling when you're sitting in that coffee shop and you're actually journaling about what you're observing and hearing around you how do you capture that i think everything sparks our creativity for paying attention you know if we think about art making and mindfulness practice for example it's all about the senses what do we hear taste smell touch what's bringing us to life what are what what are we noticing and all of that is a part of what inspires our our creativity so i remember for example i was working in a cafe and i was working on my memoir and some and i was writing about how um that my mother had me in her care for five days before she placed me for adoption and a woman came in with a newborn baby and i heard her friend talking to her and and the baby she said oh how old is she and she said she's eight days old and i remember and i was literally working on the scene in my memoir about being a five-day infant with my mother and that sparked a whole opening in my writing that wouldn't have happened if i wouldn't have saw that mother holding that little infant in her arms it just brought me into something um around empathy for imagine if that mother had to take that baby right now take her from her arms and hand her over and ever see her again and so it opened a whole part of my writing that may or may not have ever come in the book if in that moment that didn't happen you don't know but we're you know all of our creativity is in a relationship to the lives that we're living what we're seeing hearing feeling it's never in a vacuum and even if we're sitting you know in a on a quiet silent meditation for days we're still interacting with violence we're interacting with you know our own thoughts our own breath we're never not in engagement with something when we create thank you let's paint a picture for a second if you're sitting in that profi house you really have two books with you right you have the book you're working on and you have your journal they're two different things and from my point of view if you're working on a book that's what you open first your you open your not use sit down get your cup of coffee vice first you get your cup of coffee sit down and then start working on your novel let's say but then when you come out of the trance of working because something's gone on in the cafe or something's gone on in your own mind then you have your journal available to process what just happened yeah so again from my point of view the novel comes first because you don't want to be just make you don't want to be just creating journal after journal never get to your book so from my point of view the novel comes first but both are available to you and valuable sort of side by side in that moment thank you wonderful so chair and do we have any questions in the chat we have some comments the one question that I see earlier here was a comment really maybe from Sheila about art and journaling and illustrating one's journal you have a couple of nice entries in the book about the role that art can play in journaling but I wonder if you have any interesting points to make on that topic I have a very strange response to that because of something that happened recently and for San Francisco Bay Area folks this will be particularly relevant I did a book called a writer San Francisco and we luckily got the San Francisco illustrator Paul Madonna to do the illustrations for that book he's sort of well known in the bay area for doing a series of panels called all over coffee he just was recently in a terrible head-on collision and we'll recover from it but just sort of sending out vibes to him as we're talking here and that was one of my happiest experiences was working with an illustrator on a book most of my books are words but every once in a while I get to do a book where there are words and illustrations and it's very enriching for the process so a little little thought for Paul Madonna at this moment and that's all yeah thank you he's a regular speaker at mechanics whenever he's got a new book out he comes and gives a talk so that was a tragic thing that happened but I'm glad to see that he's recovering nicely so any thoughts on the illustrating yeah there's wonderful resources on mixed media journaling and art journaling for example there's a magazine can you still hear me oh yeah I can't hear you okay Eric can you hear me yes yes I can't hear you yes okay I'll just know that you can hear me and I'll figure it out um wonderful mixed media journaling where people are like you know like scrapbooking type of things or using watercolors I've seen some beautiful travel journals for example where people are doing illustrations and and journaling so absolutely some people that's the only type of journaling they do is art journaling and there's a great magazine by that title art journaling that puts out I think a quarterly publication and it's just beautiful because there's lots of how-to art journal and then lots of samples of it so it's really inspiring if you like to get really creative with your journaling to say it in a funny way I think it's a bit of a genetic necessity to have words and pictures go together if you look at kids we have a six-year-old twin granddaughters and they'll you know they'll fold over six pieces of paper and staple them together and make a book and illustrate it and tell a story and do the drawings and no one's needing to tell them to do that I think that's built into our repertoire it's something we want to do so it we we may not be drawers we may not be illustrators but there's something in our genetic makeup about music and art and writing that's important to us it's among our life purposes I think great I teach a course on vision boards and journaling combined where we can bring these different practices together and the same like some people will use oracle cards and journaling and the ways we can combine things I just hosted a workshop called journaling the labyrinth where we combined labyrinth walking and journaling both contemplated practices so not only can we do art journaling we can allow our journaling practices to become very creative processes by partnering them with these other types of practices like I mentioned earlier meditation and journaling labyrinth walking and journaling I do a lot of collage making and journaling as two separate things but I'll make the collage and then I'll look at the collage and see what inspiration wants to come in the journal so we can do all kinds of creative things and make it make it your own there's no rules and there's some you know helpful things to do um I I guess I just wonder how people set the stage for themselves to start journaling if you have people that just have never done it before or they do it in the way that I think I'm doing it with the post notes of the voicemails and the emails how do you get the the discipline um and and set the stage for for journaling yeah I have a journaling facebook group and the most common question people ask is how to journal consistently and there's the how to start journaling and then there's the how to keep journaling maybe one starts and yeah that's kind of like gym memberships in january exactly yeah I always like to think it's helpful to think about something else that you do that you've created a habit with and what helped what worked so for example maybe you pick a time of day that you want to journal and you just commit that you know 7 a.m first cup of coffee you're going to journal for 10 minutes and you start to do that regularly and get some momentum someone mentioned the morning pages in the chat which many of you will know is from The Artist Way by Julia Cameron it's one of her artist practices that's an artist recovery program and where she teaches and she does not call that journaling she specifically calls it the morning pages at where we the practice is as soon as you wake up in the morning you fill three sheets handwritten of stream of consciousness writing whatever comes I'm cold I need to find my slippers so you know whatever and and then at three pages you stop and so for some that is their daily writing practice and they don't you know do any do anything else so it's about finding what works the other is having it with you having my journal is always with me it's in my backpack it's in my bag if I get a few minutes you know waiting for my boys after their basketball game I'll sit in the car and I'll journal I don't have to really think about because now it's a habit it's a law it's a companion practice in my life but to start you want to one decide you want to start get the journal get the pen decide when you're going to do it give it a shot for a little bit and and see how you go and it can be helpful to be part of a journaling community and most people don't think of journaling it's a solitary act but in our journaling community I host monthly writing alone together circles where I take people to the page to journal and having community support can really help us that's why having a gym buddy can help us and you know that kind of thing even though it's a practice for yourself it doesn't have to be done in isolation or alone you can access community and support and inspiration and in terms of what to write about people will say okay fine I've got the journal now what what am I what am I going to write and it can be helpful to just give yourself a little prompt so for example right now I'm feeling or right now I notice and just let a prompt bring you into present moment awareness and start writing questions are great great prompts inquiries like Eric said about sleep sleep thinking asking that asking that question before you go to sleep well you can just ask a question at any time in your journal and then your journaling you can you can make a list of what questions do I have in my life right now write down all those lists of questions and they could be profound you know should I stay in my marriage or you know should I go to Mexico for March break they couldn't be you know simple things and then let those questions become your journaling prompts so you literally can have your own list of prompts that have come from you that you can use at any time it can be a lot of fun well you know that brings up a question that that I see in the chat where someone is asking I think it's Jean asking about where do you where do you put a commonplace and story idea journals so you you have this stream of consciousness journal you know that I think we all can kind of grasp but what about the commonplace the story idea the dialogue the other kinds of things that may come to mind where do you place those in the in the in journaling yeah I can only answer that for myself but I'll just sorry my journal is propping up my computer but I just have an eight by eleven blank wow book that's my journal and when I'm journaling that stream of consciousness writing that kind of typical journaling we might think of when all of a sudden it becomes something that I think will be part of my memoir for example or part of an essay or part of a blog post I just go through and I highlight it so I can go back and find it I don't have like the story journal and the dialogue journal and the travel journal and the you know I just have one journal and I have ways to mark it so I can go find it if it's become a list of ideas or it's become a you know something else so I can go get it easily wow okay great Aaron oh I want to go back to something you said a moment ago you use the the dreaded d-word discipline and Pavarotti the late Pavarotti had a quote which I quote a lot which is people say I'm disciplined but it's not disciplined it's devotion and there's a big difference yeah I call it obligation yeah and I think I think devotion I would think if we think of journaling coming from that other place of devotion of our decision to matter that we we and our efforts matter then that gives us the motivation to want to journal if we think it's a white knuckle kind of discipline thing well we stop those things all the time we don't we don't learn French we don't learn the two but we just stop those things because we haven't decided that they matter enough so we want that that's the feeling tone that we want in our being is that the journaling matters to us as part of our self-awareness process it's going to help us with our life problems it's going to help us with our writing it's just going to be overall helpful it's one of those tools that really matter to us and if we can come from the devotion place rather than the discipline place then we'll want to do it yeah I can I completely agree with that and I often start with people why do you want a journal you know you've heard you know someone's recommended it a counselor a friend a doctor you've heard it's good for your mental health but why do you want to journal what do you hope to get out of it and that answer to the why is that motivating place and you know Eric said that very eloquently around the difference between discipline and devotion devotion has our passion it has our purpose it has our longing and those things keep us going they act itself isn't the thing that keeps us doing it and I and the things we do for the love of it you know not because oh I've got a journal now because it's you know I you know those moments where you get to go to the page even sometimes I are writing a book even though it may be difficult and we might procrastinate or you know have those obstacles as Eric said if we're truly devoted to it if we love it enough we'll find the way to do it because it will matter we and we will know why it matters we won't be trying to flounder and figure that out that's already you know with us well I also think that things like journaling are part of self-care and it's it's unfortunate but the reality is that there has to be a certain amount of discipline in self-care because of our lives I mean life gets in the way sometimes we don't all have the space to be able to just say I'm just going to do this when I feel like it so I think I think interjecting the devotion is very key to being able to to do this journaling and to write what you want to write and my my question is we we know the power as you just kind of talked about Linda of journaling for mental health but for both of you what is the core power of journaling for writing well Linda may have one take on this but for me journaling is about self-awareness and writers typically don't get their writing done most novels most non-fiction books don't get finished because the writer hasn't discerned what's in the way doesn't have sufficient self-awareness of what's going on it might be a problem might be a technical problem might be a psychological problem that they don't want this material revealed in the world etc there are all kinds of different reasons why we don't get our work done and in order to get our work done we have to get under our own defenses and become more self-aware and understand what's stopping us so journaling is a way to get up is to deal with our defensive nature and have a frank conversation with ourselves that we may not have other ways of doing wonderful Linda I would add to that the importance of self-compassion because we can be very hard on ourselves oh I meant to journal but I didn't or I meant to take some time to care for myself but I didn't and it can get this perpetual self-talk that starts to feed the sense of failure or letting ourselves down or and it can become counterproductive and so I think there's that ability to keep coming fresh and to be able to say you know what can I do today in service to my writing or in service to this dream or this goal or in service to my self-care and to really have a non-judgmental self-compassionate energy with ourselves because we're more likely to thrive in what we're doing in in that you know support of an internal environment and also to be with other people who support and affirm uh you know what what we're doing so the um the ability to claim you know a lot of people don't get to things they really want to get to because they feel guilty when they go to try to do it because there's so many other things that need attention your children spouse life but we have to prioritize ourselves not at the expense of others but to prioritize our projects prioritize our our health and well-being and whatever else that we want to prioritize and then take a stand for it so I prioritize my journaling and there's times I might not do something else because I made that the priority maybe the dish to stay on the counter because I ran out of time in the morning to get them done and I'll get to them later because that was more important to me to take that time and start my day in a reflective you know grounded way than it was to to do that so we're always making choices with our time with our priorities and and with ourselves and um whether that's journaling or anything else we're trying to get to that has some value for us it's a constant um a process of showing up to to what we've decided matters and what's meaningful to us you know I love Eric talks about life purposes and how we don't just have one we can have many life purposes so you know right and but but how do we make those investments um Eric will talk about meaning investments and we spend a lot of time doing meaningless things things that just waste time social media schooling all kinds of empty vacant things that waste our time and but then when we talk about well we don't have time to exercise we don't have time to eat healthy we don't have time to work on our book we we're always making decisions about our time and whether we're putting high value activities in them or low value and each person has to decide what has high and low value but for journaling if you've decided it's a high value activity or writing your books a high value activity then we have to take a stand for it you know just you know we have if we have high value on loving our children we wouldn't say oh I don't have time to take care of you I don't have time to to listen to you because we've said we have we want we have high value on that we make the time and so we've got to take stands that's right here here I agree with that um 30 seconds each of you anything that I didn't ask you that you want to say just that if you start to skip days on your book then then you'll notice that weeks and months and years have slipped by so try to get to your writing every single day thank you Eric great stuff Linda just that there's a certain amount of you know self-care or engaging in journaling or creativity it isn't selfish it it it is um we have to unpack those things you know I remember years ago when my boys were little and we were just a quick story you know that one of those rushed times trying to get out the door for something and it was all stressful and my son was about eight at the time Jackson and he looked at me and he said mom I think you should take a minute and write in your journal and it really stayed with me because it wasn't just that I know it has value in helping me be the type of person I want to be but the people I love most at a young age had a connection that there was some connection between this thing mom does with journaling and and the type of mother she is you know whatever and so sometimes we think we've got these things in these selfish categories but in fact they serve how we love how we love others when we work how we get along with our our colleagues and and the people that matter so um I always like to say that anything we're doing that's good for us including journaling it's good for others too thank you so much both you Eric and Linda this has been absolutely wonderful and I hope that the audience has gotten a lot out of knowing why it's so important to to journal and how it can help you in so many facets of your life but also in your writing life thank you again thanks everyone wish you a terrific 2023 keep writing and thanks for being here thank you so much and I just wanted to plug my favorite my favorite point in the book plug the book again which you can't see but for some reason because I don't know my background it's an homage to the invisible man right it's one of thousands of other books that we have in our collection here at the Mechanics Institute but on page 66 Judy Reeves mentions one of her tips for getting started in journaling is to just write about one moment that mattered today and so I hope that this moment mattered today enough for you to get started on your your journaling practice um thank you Eric and Linda and Cheryl as always and I hope to see you next month on the third Friday of February where we will be discussing uh breaking into uh writing contests um and fear not about copying all the pertinent links in the chat I'm going to send all of our registrants an email shortly with the link to the video uh the important bits from the chat links to our speakers websites and books and also a link again to the great book of journaling where you can buy it or where you can borrow it from your local library and also I'd love for you to fill out the evaluation form which I will send you also in the email thank you again and I hope you have a wonderful journaling practice and uh afternoon thanks all thanks everybody all right see you next month happy weekend yes


Season's greetings. We hope that you all enjoy the cheer this time can bring. And this year, more than ever recall, that winter always turns to spring.