Anything You Can Write About, You Can Change
Taking note, and by that I mean taking notice that you’ve noticed something in the disciplined action of writing it down, is the power to change the future.
There is a story behind this natural philosophy, and I look forward to sharing it with you. But there are many moving pieces, an infinite number of possibilities entwined in between the moment you write and the future which it changes. It might not be the future you intended. It might not be any kind of world you’d imagined being possible at all. Yet all the same, the moment you find that note for the second, fifth or seven hundredth time, it is a moment that would never had been had you not taken the time to take write that note at all.
A note is a time-capsule, a means of transporting internal memory from one network to another, a game for increasing the odds of remembering tomorrow what you knew today, a key for knowing the right thing at the right time in order to live the right results. The note is a conversation with your later self, perhaps older and wiser, but nonetheless still desperate for a good word and sensical advice. With a few moments’ insight and a note, you can be in more than one place at more than one time, impacting your world in ways not so easy to erase as the rest of this digitized age.
In this way, the smart note is a tool for harnessing the power of human memory in a externalized way. A personal note to self is a pathway for remembering, for getting better at what you do with what you remember, and even for getting better at remembering to remember better things. It is a strategy for tinkering with the algorithms of your own mind and customizing the directions of your thoughts to their desired results.
Every time that you write something down, it is a trigger. It has many meanings, some that will only be specific to you. But there are other shared meanings too, realities that are the same for all people at all times. One such shared meaning is that, whenever you write something down, you want to see it a second time. That is its point. That is the loop you can harness and expand. When you start to make intentional notice of what you are noticing, there is no telling what you may find. When you embark on a journey to remember, you take action to change the future.
Are you reading Paul Kingsnorth's Abbey of Misrule substack? There is a fascinating overlap between your thought and his. Consider this, from Kingsnorth's latest:
"Imagine you are writing, with a pen, in the evening by a fire. Imagine the light of the fire. It moves in patterns across the ceiling. Perhaps it dances, perhaps it has something to tell you. Imagine the flow of ink onto page. You used to write teenage love letters like this. It’s a mess, like your heart. Every line is different, every letter. It is slow. Your wrist hurts. Can you scrub out that embarrassing sentence, or will she make it out? Do you need to start again?"