Slips for my mind

On the joys of externalizing memory.

I’ve started carrying around note cards and my favorite multi-pen, and jotting down notes from books I’m reading, podcast recommendations from friends, and insights that bubble up during meditation. A friend told me about this method a couple of years ago, but I came across it again in The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload by Daniel J. Levitin. He writes in the second chapter,

As humble and low-tech as it may seem, the 3x5 card system is powerful. That is because it builds on the neuroscience of attention, memory and categorization. The task-negative or mind-wandering mode [of the brain] is responsible for generating much useful information, but so much of it comes at the wrong time… You might say categorizing and externalizing our memory enables us to balance the yin of our wandering thoughts with the yang of our focused execution.

I didn’t realize how much of my creativity has been stuck in my body since I became a mother, which feels ironic, since that transformation was an act of creation unlike any other I’ve experienced. Still, I am liberating myself by releasing thoughts and ideas from my mind. The spaciousness is energizing.

I find myself having the space to return to ideas and mull them over, letting connections form in delightful ways. I’ve also been iterating on images that I find compelling; lately, I’ve been playing with a way of drawing stars that I saw in one of the books my child had checked out from the library. One iteration was this little drawing I did a couple of weeks ago during daily prayer in the chapel:

I like that the light is darkness, and darkness is light. I like the letting go necessary when drawing something quickly with a single brush pen!

And then, this is the drawing that my child and I collaborated on at her request, after she saw what I was doing:

The communion table really captured her imagination!

These little slips of paper are fun and low-stakes. It’s such a relief to have these thoughts and ideas and dreams that have been crowding each other in my mind and spirit, now written down and sorted in a little recipe box on my desk. I imagine it will also be fun to ‘cook’ with these ingredients over the coming months.

Practicing in love,

Kelsey