My new thought-playground and finding my footing
Okay, it’s happened, the pressure of not having written you for a while has won out over the beautiful, reading- and lolling-inducing days (see below) and here I am…
This week I’m thinking about the truism that development is not linear and the vulnerable hope, as a teacher and mentor, that messy processes can be the best ones to show to invite someone to try something new and uncomfortable.
You see, I spent last week immersed in rebuilding my “Second Brain” in Roam Research, which has the tagline “a note-taking tool for networked thought.” I resisted the #RoamCult for over a year, seeing it as (yes, I’m judgy) a fad tool for white-boy techies and developers wanting to be on a cutting edge. They call themselves a cult and I agreed without fact-checking.
Why harp on my shiny new tool? One, because I was dead wrong about it being just a shiny tool or just for someone who looks and acts a certain way (that I hadn’t defined well anyhow) and humility is called for.
But more broadly, I’m opening up this side of my process, even though it feels especially nerdy and somewhat ridiculously niche, because our tools for thinking and creating can significantly change our practices as well as our outlooks.
I talk a lot here about learning playfully and making a PhD program experience wherein you can thrive. I do those things much less often than is proper to admit.
I’ve been more consciously designing my digital systems for capturing what I take in and organizing it for serendipity and creativity since April 2020. In my first burst of activity I ended up with a basic but powerful Second Brain that re-oriented me from librarian and collector to curator and creator. I actually revisited my course notes and connected them to lots of other ideas. Most of all I let go of preciousness: since it was so much easier to capture ideas from all kinds of places and trust I could find them as needed, I didn’t worry nearly as much about capturing every single thing. I focused on resonance over coverage in what I saved and later consumed. For once, I felt abundance over scarcity, both in what I knew and what I could draw on to learn and create.
With that new system and mindset I grew more confident as a budding researcher, giving 4 solid talks on my work in 2021 and starting many more conversations about my research. I even started to call it my research. As I prepare for my oral exams with this note-taking system in place and a comfortable identity as a (new) researcher, I am starting from a place of joy and interest and meandering to the next resonant theme on my road to mastery. Before, I was paralyzed by the vastness of the terrain to be covered and my eye was drawn to all I didn’t know. Now that I’ve situated myself on the ground and become more sure of step, my preparation is an opportunity to develop my own take on things and have tons of cool conversations with interesting scholars, whether through dialogues with their writing or personal chats.
Roam comes in now, after a fall semester where I built out my system into one that helped me act on the chunks of knowledge I was accumulating, turning them into flexible and reusable Lego-blocks of my own (first) brain’s making. The biggest change there was from tasks to projects, which involved habits, routines and committing to practices too (Seth Godin’s eponymous book The Practice was transformational there).
Last week Roam came in to show me that I, too, could have what Sönke Ahrens calls “a reliable and simple external structure to think in that compensates for the limitations of our brains.” That’s a pretty solid definition of a Second Brain in general—what I was missing was the trust that I could find tools that work even with my fucked-up, all-over-the-place, magpie, ADHD, unwilling-to-give-up-depth-OR-breadth, monotony-allergic, habit-resistant, neuro-divergent brain.
Roam has a dead simple starting point—a daily notes page you type bullet points into—and no apparent cap on how high or intricate you can build your structures, one connection, note, or personal Lego-block at a time. I’ll save nerding out for when I know more and can distill my thoughts. For now I’ll say that this tool has made it true playground fun to hang out in my Second Brain. The bullet points make it all feel drafty, which is a perfect antidote to my perfectionism. I don’t get into that Study Mode that I resist so much when I’m in Roam, partly because the system can be built out through light touches and simmering ideas on slow burn, a reference here that I’ll find to follow up on, half a sentence there that’s linked to every context I might want it in with a few keystrokes. I don’t have to sit down for 4-hour heavy lifts to write something. I’m writing this issue in Roam right now (screenshot below, eep sharing mess!)
…. and it’s pushed me—or rather nudged me, willing—to start studying for my PhD oral exam in Greek poetry, which previously felt like a deadweight lift I’d never be ready for.
What’s my point here? It’s not that you should all go off and use Roam, of course.
It is that playful, joyful, easeful learning and creating is possible, yes, even for you, you bundle of faults and exceptions and insecurities. I’ve found much more affirming ways to work with my brain instead of against it through systems and practices that I built myself, with a lot of modeling from solid, generous thinkers and mentors. That’s a thing you can have too—for a start, hit “Reply” and let me know your current thoughts and struggles with all this and I’ll help you get on your way!
Up next…
If you for some reason dug into the screenshot of this issue in process, you’ll know that I over-plan (another way to psych oneself out about writing a thing). But it also gives both of us some idea of what’s coming:
A deeper dive into John McPhee, a nonfiction writer I deeply admire and consider myself apprenticed to from afar
The delights of Wisława Szymborska, the Nobel-prize winning Polish poet, in English translation and what it’s like to read as a translator (and claim that label everyone’s been giving me for a few years now…)
More on a super cool-scary long-form personal writing project I’m working on, a sample poem from which I’ll leave you with:
A poem
can’t be a precious thing:
FRAGILE, Hold This Side Up
Can’t be fragile:
For we must not break it.
A poem
Can’t be alive
For it is naturally constricted.
A poem
Can’t better the World
For the World (that is) cannot be bettered--
Yes, and--
It does not want to.
A poem can
Meditate on a world
Meditate on a word
Reflect with word the world
Not perfectly--
Yes, nor darkly--
But through a glass, prismatically.
In this its balm:
That it gathers together again the facets it’s rudely exposed
Before leaving itself in you.
A poem
Is no fragile thing
For it has never been written on water.
In bodies it slinks from diaphragm
To core to cord to chord
I hope to choir
To surface skin to drum
Oh, it hammers
Incessant
Ennervates
Innervates
Electrifies
Bounces about
So fast it is by all eyewitness accounts
A solid thing.
In hands it moves on
Mouth to hand to paper wood metal
To paper holy hand mouth until
Choral recitation.
Lately the polyphonic chorus choreographs
A poem
So smooth, so balanced in its dynamite tensions
That it is, in each version,
A still and solid thing.
Has this letter made it around to you through the interwebs, and you’d like to hear more?
Feeling like connecting? Hit reply to this email, leave a comment below, or slide into my Twitter DMs at @jacobusbanks. I’ll get back to you.