Our Journey, Day 80

I'm back in my home office, which is very nice. The cats are happy to see me, I think, I'm looking forward to a book club meeting this morning and then to getting to work on my project. As I've walked around, settling into my space, I took a quick look at my Obsidian graph. Every once in a while I like to animate it, and watch things grow. As anyone who has played with this feature knows, the settings have a lot to do with the way the graph view builds itself. It's interesting to me, playing around with these settings and seeing what emerges. In the case of the image I settled on, I'm showing only notes that I've filled with some content. My typical practice in Obsidian is to double-bracket words that represent ideas I want to return to. This creates an "empty" note for the idea. I like this because its a reminder to go back and work on that idea. But in this case, I'm only looking at notes I've actually written. It's interesting that some of them come into existence as part of a set of connected ideas, but others are one-offs and just populate a ring I call the Oort Cloud on the outskirts. And then some of them get pulled into the center when I link them to other ideas. This has mostly happened organically. I rarely go looking for orphan ideas and deliberately link them. I've heard people talk about that type of note-making hygiene, but I'm typically too busy. Maybe someday I'll devote some time to that and I suppose it will probably yield some insights.

That's not to say I'm not interested in keeping my vault "clean" and useful to me. One of the reasons I've resisted automations that populate the vault with things I didn't put there is, I want to be able to look at this as a thing I'm working on and not as another book I need to read. So this is not a vault into which I allow apps to import data. Not even Readwise. Another thing I haven't really resolved in my process is the difference between tags and notes. For example, right now when I post a book review on my Historiography thread on Substack, I tag it #Blog with the date. I did not have a note called [[Blog]] -- now I have an empty note by that name. If I make that an actual note by writing something in it (as I've just done), then I can begin converting that hashtag into a link to this page. The result of that will be I'll be able to see how much of my content is connected to my blogging. So I guess, although I haven't made any type of ideological commitment to either tagging or refraining from tagging, the logic that "emerges" from what I've been doing is that tags are a way to test out whether ideas group together in a way that I want to explore more fully and permanently.

People who aren't Obsidian users are probably either confused or bored or both at this point. Sorry about that. The point I'd make and the reason I bring it up though, is that often the tools we use have a lot of influence on the things we do. In this case, on the ways I might think. Because although I don't often take the time to do it, I do see value in reviewing my notes. It certainly doesn't make sense to be constantly adding information but never integrating it with what I've already thought about. So I'll continue working on this and talking about it. The first step, as I've mentioned already, will probably involve reviewing the things I've been thinking and blogging about over the last 80 days and organizing the stuff I want to pursue in a deeper and better organized way. I'm sort-of seeing this daily blog as a way of bubbling up things that are occurring to me. Then I can figure out how to pursue them or not.