Veins bulging at her temples, body drenched in sweat, and muscles are screaming for relief. Your Muse continues to administer CPR to keep your creativity alive. Every chest compression pushes oxygenated blood to the extremities and keeps the brain functioning. The Muse knows you both have much left undone.

There are more poems, code, proposals, equations, and songs to be written. If your creative persistence dies, your addition to the annals of the human experiment remains incomplete, and your Muse dies with you.

Do you journal to give the Muse a creative outlet to prepare for work?

Author and human guinea pig, Tim Ferriss, says he is using his morning journal for "caging my monkey mind on paper so I can get on with my !@$&*# day." 

At the beginning of the year, I journaled daily for a month. Much like Tim Ferriss, giving myself the freedom to get my thoughts out of my head provided space for other thoughts to rattle around in the free space.

The practice improved when I gave up on the secret desire to write for a future audience that would stumble across the manic writing and discover genius. It took a significant sales pitch to convince my deluded self that I am not the next Anne Frank or Leonardo Devinci. Nobody around me needed the sales pitch, but I did.

Journaling is a personal pursuit. Recording thoughts, hopes, fears, and dreams. We capture the milestones and mundane on the pressed pages and store the completed volume on the shelf for posterity and a ready reference to who I was when I penned the pages.

What is your story, why do you journal?