Citation needed
Recently, I keep coming back to the notion of journaling in the morning as clearing the brain’s cache. It helps loosen me up, makes it OK to write about anything and to pivot at a moment's notice.
I wish I remembered where I first came across it, or if it’s somehow an expression of my own creation, but it feels totally apt for what it is.
Which then got me thinking: what is this obsession with tracking down the source of things, anyway? Especially with the Internet being, you know, A Thing, there's almost the sense that you're not using it right if you cite something but don't know its source.
Maybe it’s about the journey: tracking the original source means following a breadcrumb of links. Every stop along the way is also a fork in the road, except in this case the fork is really a node connected to, potentially, hundreds of hundreds of other nodes. And sure, you can keep on the path to the destination, but you can also take a detour, or two, or a hundred.
When the only thing driving your engagement is the pursuit of knowledge, and not the army of people behind a product built to keep you scrolling and clicking and viewing, I think a little of those activities is actually good. It opens you up to new ideas, new connections, new thoughts.
And then, maybe you write about what you saw and the connections you made, and add another dot to that ever expanding knowledge graph.
⁂