G A R O

I am ambivalent at best toward online Bullet Journal culture, more often I find the ferver off putting. I have found the book 📚 to be none of that. Today, and yesterday, one line is particularly applicable:

When you say yes to one thing, you are saying no to something else.¹

That point is much more broadly applicable to me too, but I’m focusing on today. I said yes to several things today: journaling about yesterday, errands, repairing a sliding door that wasn’t sliding,² visiting with a friend, and making dinner. Making dinner to me means cooking and preparing, and serving, a time consuming thing. But it’s all making and sharing. It’s something that I haven’t said yes to enough.

But saying yes to these things means I didn’t say yes to some other things that are also important to me, but apparently less so? Or less right now? I’m not sure. They were less urgent. Working ahead of time on this blog post is one thing that got a no. And making some art with my plotter also got a no today.

Sidebar comment: It’s not the right time, but I am exploring alternative names to “bullet journal.” I am not a fan of the bullet in bullet journal. Maybe “just journal” or “right journal” or… hmm. I don’t know, it’s a work in progress.

I guess there will be more posts in this theme, this personal journey of journaling.

Some things I quickly captured this week with Captio:

• Some just barely absurd foods. You have to grab them quick or they start to sound too ridiculous or maybe actually someone eats that. E.g.s: grilled peas, fried lettuce, smoked apples or avocados, and shredded artichoke hearts. It was kind of a writing exercise, very “when the inspiration strikes.”
• What color ink I suspect that I used in my notebook quite a while ago: Sailor Nano Souboku or Lamy Blue Black. Probably the latter, it’s darker.
• The Goal Streaks app. For tracking my blogging streak. Do I really need an app for this??
• On Lies:
  • Pluto: “No mind is ever willingly deprived of the truth.” Via Epictetus, Discourses 2.22.36.
  • Alan Turing: “Hardest time to lie to someone is when they are expecting to be lied to.”
• Also from The Imitation Game: “Sometimes it’s the very people who no one imagines anything of who do the things no one can imagine.” Christopher Morcom.
• If you’re lacking motivation, perhaps the next action is not actually small enough. Break it down some more. Also, the 10 minute rule.
• “Remember, for everything you say yes to, you’re also saying no to something else.” Ryder Carroll in The Bullet Journal Method, p 105.

There were a few other odds and ends about bigger ideas that I’m not ready to share, and a couple of bits related to ongoing projects around the house.

Next step: migrate these from my email inbox to the right longer term home.

↝ morrow

Just doing a quick tour through this. I kinda feel like my notes aren’t gelling, and I’ve started collecting kind of a lot of them. A friend said this was working for him, so I’ll take a look. Not planning to read every page though. I’ll set a reminder to post an update in a couple of months.

Currently reading: The Bullet Journal Method: Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the Future by Ryder Carroll 📚

Public library for the win, it’s even a physical copy!

I’ve had to move Discourses, Fragments, Handbook (Oxford Worlds Classics) by Epictetus 📚 to my Reading, but like not right now shelf. I have completed Book 1, and will shortly finish Book 2. Books 3 and 4, the Fragments, and the Handbook will have to wait until some other time. I’ll probably start with the Handbook when I do pick it back up. I have some more thoughts…

I may do a more well thought out review later, when I finish the rest of it. But here is my hot-ish take right now:

1. Is it me or is he brining up death, exile, and suicide-as-a-legitimate-option kind of a lot? Maybe times were a lot different back then and these were common concerns. Or maybe these things loomed large in the minds of his target audience: the wealthy men that could afford to hire philosophy teachers.
2. He has his moments when he’ll say directly what he means. But a lot of the time he is pretty round about with getting to the point, or saying clearly what he is trying to tell his students. It can be rather indirect. Is it a mysterious affectation? A conversational style to engage the listener? He was speaking these words, after all. Something else, like giving the audience what they want to hear, what they’re expecting a philosopher to sound like?
3. Come to think of it, I get the sense that he doesn’t think too highly of a lot of the students or interlocutors he’s addressing. Even if they are just hypothetical people he sets up to knock down, it seems like not the most trusting of teaching styles. It also seems like his students maybe had a habit of coming all haughtily arrogant and he’s got to take them down a peg. I find it off putting and boring. Tiresome. The teacher is not taking the students seriously.
4. At several points he makes rather unserious arguments. That a god or gods exists isn’t even said as an axiom, it’s just so obvious that anyone who says differently is a fool. This, Epictetus, is not an argument. Instead of treating the competing philosophical schools seriously, they are usually rather casually characatured, or straw man/person’d and considered dealt with. Frankly, I can hear the guy yelling about it through the ages and pages even today.
5. Not a very inclusive group either. It was the times, sure. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t color the rest of the work. How are you going to just paint over those pieces and not see/wonder how they have distorted the rest?

All that said, there have been a few passages that seem quite useful. There were some interesting points made that are worth pondering. But there was a lot of wading through sections that wavered on the edge of just not worth reading, with the occassional bit of useful life observation hidden in there that makes you not give up. Even if the life observed was almost 2000 years ago, some things are still familiar.

↝ morrow

Again, with the power prompt today there was too much material. Here is the current recipe:

1. Write what happened. This can be brief.
2. Write why it happened, if it needs motivating.
3. Write about what I think it means, if that is something that I spent time thinking about.
4. If necessary, write about the context. That might have something to do with the above.

It turns out that a lot happens on an ordinary Monday. I don’t think that I am being too detail oriented either. I guess I need to be more efficient with my words? I suspect that as a writer this is a good problem to have, so I’ll keep working that particular problem. I’d like to get through the whole day; there are things that are worth writing about in the later part of the day too.

Here are a couple of things to try tomorrow:

• Write the shortest possible recounting. Just the events. These are like the notes of the day, from memory.
• Pick the things that seem worth diving deeper into first, and write about those. Trouble is that it’s not always obvious what I’m going to get when I start unwrapping some thing that happened.
• Make those notes of the sequence while it’s happening? Just the briefest possible notes.
• Go in reverse order. Might be weird to do. Might be worth it anyway.

I’ll also finally get around to reading the next chapter in Writing Life Stories sometime soon.

↝ morrow

Time is running out and I haven’t thought of much to write here today. I did use my power prompt and got lots of words out, but not anything that I felt like elaborating on here. I’m not sure yet how to translate all that personal material to the things I write here, even though I think that they shouldn’t be all that separate.

Speaking of that power prompt, the first day was really great. The second was much more of just a recounting of what happened, static sequence of events style. Not much of why did that happen, and what might it mean. So today I let some of that stuff back in. The pages just fill up. I didn’t have time to get it all down in the morning. I had to make a bit more time in the afternoon to finish. Lots of directions this can go, I think. Looking forward to exploring as many of them as possible.

A few random thoughts:

• Monday the thirteenth always seemed like a better bad luck day than Friday.
• Does any one eat “tuna nachos”? It sounded just plausible enough to me to exist. Tuna salad scattered on some potato chips. You could even melt cheddar over it, tuna melt style. Not sure it’s something that I want to exist, but it just might. Inspired by the tuna salad that fell off my sandwich on some chips at lunch today. Thought of a few other “just plausible enough” foods, and a few duds.
• Not been much reading of Dracula lately. I hope everyone is ok.

It’s a really nice day to share an all too brief and far too rare June rain with some friends that surprise come over and bring pizza fixings and also enjoy the rain with you, even if it means we have to abandon the patio at the end because it is in fact raining a bit too much to stay outside. It’s a very lucky thing.

There was a comment on a hackernews post this morning about journaling that I thought I would give a try: just recount what happened in the last 24 hours. So I tried it. I didn’t add too much of what I thought of what happened later, just what I remember thinking about it at the time. I plan to follow up with later thoughts on some of those things.So much came out of this. I think it was 4 pages¹ before I got tired of writing. And that only covered about 12 hours.²

Now I have a solid default option for journaling, and it’s a powerful one.

There was a second suggestion somewhere in that thread: journal twice a day. I could see the last 24 hours really being useful in the morning. And an evening session for elaboration, further thoughts, or just other topics. I do think that this is worth the time investment, but it is that: a time investment.

< blockquote pre=“Martin Buber” >All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.< /blockquote >

There were many charming and interesting things mentioned in The Grail by Brian Doyle 📚, more than I expected for such a local interest book.

I like the framing of this as “secret destinations” even though I don’t think those destinations are pre-decided and don’t need to be. You find them in you, in the place, and in the moment, alone or with those around you. The destinations can even remain secret to you alone.

They’re kind of like a very condensed version of the way that Doyle describes stories:

< blockquote pre=“Brian Doyle” cite=“The Grail, p. 148” >…this is what happens to people and stories, you sense them and collect them and tell them and savor them and then you and the stories move along down the road, sometimes together and sometimes not.< /blockquote >

Those secret destinations in every journey are our own personal poetry, resonant in our hearts and minds. Even on the longest journey.

< blockquote pre=“Dag Hammarskjold” >The longest journey is the journey inward.< /blockquote >

I won’t make a big thing about this. Because I commuted to the office today, I have less time to write here tonight.

1. Been watching Stargate: SG-1 lately. What exactly is Teal’c’s character motivation, anyway?
2. I have a tendency to heap all responsibility on my own head. Well, realizing that is not new. Recognizing it while it was actually happening was. That’s progress!

Such is life.

It’s fun to notice the shorter and longer phrases that you’re noticing while reading.

• “through empty lands south of Hollister” - Pinnacles National Park wikipedia entry
• “frontiers that favored” - from “A brief history of equality” by Piketty,
• “Like an hour I must come, and like an hour pass away.” - Epictetus, in Discourses.

These are often not even whole sentences, just a few words that stand out as more resonant that their neighbors.

For the last couple of weeks< marginnote >Actually 4 weeks.< /marginnote >I’ve been planning out my writing schedule. On Sunday night I make a plan. 30 minutes this day, an hour that day. And I’ve been sticking to it. Make the plan on Sunday night, do the writing the rest of the week. Until this week. I think it was the three day weekend; Sunday night wasn’t the “wind down the weekend” night, so I didn’t make a plan. Time to make a plan and get back on track. No big deal, just get back on the writing plan.

I had a brief visit to the West Division of Pinnacles National Park this morning, to hike the Balconies Cave trail, and a bit more. And a bit less. It didn’t go entirely as planned, but it was a nice day out in the wildlands.

Fun fact, this is the western portion of a volcano that straddled the San Andreas Fault and was subsequently sheared apart. This portion moved 200 miles north by the fault. The eastern portion remained, known as Neenach Formation and it is evidently not as dramatic.