I take lots of notes, and I keep them all. I have records of my school work going back through elementary school, and I often go back through things just to see what I find. Old book reports are some of my favorites, because even if I recognize the name of the book I often find that I can't remember anything else--but I almost always remember doing the report. The same thing happens with some of the bigger projects. My junior thesis from high school, for example, was a study of several books by Tim O'Brien (Going After Cacciato, The Things They Carried, In the Lake of the Woods). I don't even remember reading these books, but I definitely remember the project. I fumbled through my first draft (teacher's comment: "this paper was perplexing"), but by the end I put together something that I was proud of.
I also keep copies of things that I've read (from teachers who actively seek to destroy the environment by printing out 35+ copies of a chapter from a textbook, for example). These are far more useful to keep because I can re-read them start to finish, while book reports give me nothing to work with at all. But my favorite kinds of notes are the things that I had no business writing in the first place. Notes in the margins of books and readings like "why are we reading this," or "I gave up here," or "this author sucks." I wasn't always so belligerent. Later in my high school years there is a trend toward comments that are irrelevant to the readings but show that I was at least thinking about stuff. In a copy of Mill's On Liberty, in a place where he talks about how truth is created through a continuous process of revision I noted "I wonder if this is why people like arguing so much. Do we all understand that conflict and resolution leads to progress?" These notes fascinate me because they tend to reveal my own assumptions--"people like arguing." Do they really? I suppose it seemed like it to 16-year-old me, but I would take issue with that now.
That's where the real value of my notes becomes clear. Getting a glimpse of my high school self is a nice way to reminisce, sure. But getting inside my younger self's head is also a way to notice how I am not the same person now. I have grown and changed, while my notes have stayed the same. Some of the readings are still boring--but now I can say that they are boring not just because they are irrelevant but because I think they are wrong and here's why, etc. Nothing in life is permanent, but notes are a permanent object that represents shifting interpretation--they are permanent, their content never is.
Sometimes I find things in my notes that I don't even remember writing. Here's one:
Remember the Past.
Accept the Present.
Seek out the Future.
But Choose How
What did this mean when I wrote it? No idea. Looking at it years later, I had to do some serious thinking to make it coherent. So here's how I thought about it. Remembering the past is nice sometimes, but it also stinks to remember your regrets. Accepting the present might be a nice ideal to pursue, but sometimes there are things that seem wrong and you don't want to accept them. And seeking the future is all fine and good, except for when things don't work out the way you want--then all your seeking has done is set you up for failure. But the key to these conflicts is choosing how to execute each mandate--to deal with the good and the bad differently.
Remembering good things simply as memories can bring you pleasure, and remind you of how to enjoy life. But remembering the bad things, and the things that you regret, doesn't have to be painful if you seek to learn from them. When I was little I tried to investigate the bottom of my mom's tea and I ended up in the ER with a new nickname--potato hand. Not only does that make for a funny story, but the pain of that memory undoubtedly stopped me from burning myself in that way ever again. It's painful to remember my grandpa's death, but even stronger than my sadness are my memories of him and the examples he set--and those are worth remembering.
Accepting the present is easy when everything is going well--in order to enjoy that chocolate all that you have to accept is that it is chocolate, chocolate is good for your soul, and you are eating it. But when someone treats me unfairly it seems like accepting it is the last thing I should do. But really, the moment they finish speaking they actually have treated my unfairly in the past. So all I have to do is remember it, and learn from it, and seek to act differently in the future. In the present it really is best for me to accept it--the only alternate would be to ignore them entirely, and that is unproductive. I may choose not to accept that the environment is being damaged continuously--but in order to fight that trend I have to accept that it is happening, because the opposite is blatantly ignorant.
Seeking the future is important, because having goals is so important for motivating yourself and achieving your goals gives so much satisfaction. But I feel guilty when I fail to achieve the goals I seek. This was a difficult one to puzzle through. But then I realized that when you work towards a goal you can think of it not as actively causing a result but rather as creating conditions that make that result more likely. I couldn't choose to become a doctor because I couldn't predict the future; but I could have taken science class and interned at a hospital to make it more likely that that result could take place. If I failed, it would still be my fault to some extent--but I have the comfort of knowing that every step of the way the future was beyond my direct control--which, when you think about it, it always is.
I highly doubt that my high school self thought all of this through when he wrote the note. But doing so now, I think that it's really not bad advice at all. Notes are valuable not because of what we write, but because of what we remember, how we interpret our writing when we read it later, and how we choose to apply that thinking as we move forward. Our notes are meaningful in the past, present, and future too--that's why we make them. They help you remember, they help you accept, and they help you seek. Writing is all about communication, and notes are the most meaningful writing because they are communication with yourself across time.
I think this is a fitting introduction to this blog. My purpose is to share some of the things that float through my head each day. Sometimes they are complex, sometimes they are simple, sometimes they are meaningful only to me. But they are all genuine in the moment they are conceived--I make no promises about what they will be after that.
