“How does one keep an imagination fresh in a world that works double-time to suck it away? … I think that the answer is, one must live a curious life. One must have stacks and stacks and stacks of books on the inside of their bodies. And those books don’t have to be the things that you’ve read. I mean, that’s good, too, but those books could be the conversations that you’ve had with your friends that are unlike the conversations you were having last week.”
- Jason Reynolds
Epigraph
So Much To See
“This is one corner… of one country, in one continent, on one planet that’s a corner of a galaxy that’s a corner of a universe that is forever growing and shrinking and creating and destroying and never remaining the same for a single millisecond. And there is so much, so much to see.”
Doctor Who
Change My Mind
To change my own mind. I try to create a new vocabulary or terrain for myself, so that I open out — I always think of the Dutch claiming land from the sea — or open up something that would have been closed to me before. That’s the point and the pleasure of it. I continuously scrutinize my own thinking. I write something and think, How do I know that that’s true? If I wrote what I thought I knew from the outset, then I wouldn’t be learning anything new.”
Marilynne Robinson
When asked why she writes: “To change my own mind” is an excellent way to analyze and then describe something.
Unreliable Criticism
The world is an extremely unreliable critic. The world likes useful; value is personal. Being creative has its own rewards, but acclaim, admiration, or even respect are not to be expected.
Ethan Hawke
Books
Books are made out of books
Cormac McCarthy
Read/Write/Learn
“If you think you can learn a lot from reading books, try writing one.”
James Clear
Time Travel
It isn’t just saving ideas. It’s about having conversations with your past and future self, so you can develop ideas over time.
I’ve been experimenting with several PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) tools such as Bear Notes and Obsidian. This includes a relatively new feature called back links where you can attach several similar notes to each other. By using double brackets such as [[Photography]] in any note related to photographs each relevant note can be pulled up and referenced easily.
This has been a huge timesaver for me as I’ll jot down notes, messages or links for reference. In its own way, I can go back in time and pull out these notes and develop my chain of thoughts more accurately.
Worn Out
“We must all either wear out or rust out, everyone of us. My choice is to wear out”
Theodore Roosevelt
More Than Niche
Try to be a legitimately interesting person with all the varied things you find fascinating, and don’t worry if it takes longer than the growth you see from others.
Someone
Restating the Obvious
“We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”
George Orwell
Quarantine Day #300
Going nowhere…isn’t about turning your back on the world; it’s about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply.
-Leonard Cohen