What is a journey? How does one begin?

You would think it would involve a conscious, proactive step of some sort. In reality, while a journey may begin with movement, that movement can be jarring or even imperceptible where only in hindsight is it seen or felt. The movement also is not always forward, it can be up, down, sideways or backwards. The beginning can be like a trampoline where you jump up and reach a high only to begin soaring downward, hopefully remembering to bend your knees when you land so you can try your best to lift yourself up once again. Or the beginning can feel like a badly engineered slide where you need to keep skooching with your heels in order to get down to the bottom where you didn't want to end up in the first place. Or, as is often the case, the beginning of a journey is not even recognized as the beginning until you are well in sight of nearing its end. 

On this rare leap year day, it seems funny that this should be how our journey began, with a leap.