This essay started with a small present.
I gave my friend Giancarlo an agenda.
He looked at it and asked me what the real benefit of journaling was.
It was a good question.
And good questions have a habit of staying around.
So I started reading.
Marcus Aurelius. Benjamin Franklin. Joan Didion. Adler and Van Doren. Researchers on expressive writing. Modern thinkers on note-taking and decision-making.
Different centuries. Different purposes.
Yet the same simple act kept appearing:
stop, write, think.
This essay is about why.
And perhaps about something larger too.
Because writing down what happened is useful.
Writing down what we think it means may be much more valuable.
