How might I characterize my posts on this site, compared to the entries in my notebooks and journals, or the linked notes in my “Zettelkasten”? How are they different from each other, both in my reasons for creating them and in their contents?
I write often, usually for brief stretches that result in relatively short artifacts of one sort or another, but even a single instance of writing can have multiple functions. For example, I could be documenting plans, using writing as a thinking partner, or trying to find a way to express something I have only a vague sense of.
I don’t usually start writing first, leaving until later to decide where the artifact should go. A post on this site generally starts as a draft post, and a new slip in the Zettelkasten generally starts as a draft note there. Notes in a notebook and entries in a journal usually start and remain in those respective books.
The posts here are one way I practice sharing. With ideas, formulations, and even questions being generally provisional, evolving over time, it can feel right to share these honest ephemera.
It is my sense that the most effective, sustained work can be done when there is a give and take of divergent and convergent thinking, when generation and focus play well together. I find, however, that when I am in a mode of divergent thinking, I am not able to simply switch over to a mode of convergent thinking. I revolt at the thought of “sitting down and doing the work,” or of wrangling my ideas into single file. Similarly, when I am in a mode of convergent thinking, I am not particularly open to pausing to “try something else.”
Can there be a consistency when in the mode of divergent thinking, or an openness to multiple directions when in the mode of convergent thinking? In other words, instead of the give and take being a switching back and forth, can it be a presence of one in the other, similar to the black-in-white and white-in-black of the traditional yin-yang symbol?
I imagine so, but I do not always experience my own thinking working in that way. Rather, I can lose patience with myself when my modes of thinking do not play well together…as now, when I have come up with many networked thoughts in response to an academic call for papers, but I am frustrated by my failing efforts to weave the connective tissue of explanation.
“I can lose patience with myself.” Alan Watts might chide, “Who is the I? Where is the myself?”