When the world around me is swirling with unsettling upheaval and change, I turn to my sanctuary, my writing. It’s been my sanctuary through good times and bad, since I was 15, for more than half a century; 57 years and counting. Writing is a treasured, comforting, and stable reality for me. It’s always there. I can’t say that about a lot in life.

Writing has been around for a long time. The first pen, made of bamboo or reed, was invented in Egypt in 3200 BC, more than five thousand years ago. In 1795, Nicholas-Jacques Conte invented the first graphite pencil in France. In 1829, William Austin Burt, an American, patented a typewriter machine called the “Typographer”.

Lest you think the ability to have words you speak recorded, the first person to record sound was Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a French inventor who, 168 years ago in 1857, created a phonautograph that inscribed the vibrations of airborne sounds (like your speech) onto a permanent medium. Twenty years later in 1877, Thomas Edison gained fame with his invention, the phonograph that records and plays back what it’s heard.

Writing has been with us for more than five thousand years. I am one of many for whom writing – in and of itself – is a family member. My relationship with writing is as intimate with myself as it gets. All of me (and I would think anyone) has to be present in the moment when writing. Once the words are underway, whether they are words in a journal, bemoaning the fact the local store was out of Pistachio, mulling over the circumstances of my own life, writing to you, I am fully present with me, and I am whole.