Daily pages - July 23, 2021

I’m excited to try this and see what happens. I have been aware of morning pages for a while, but I’ve never really wanted to do the longhand thing. I do sometimes write longhand as I think it’s a good way to access other parts of your brain, but I do almost everything on my computer and it seems like this would be easier than storing tons of paper over time.

Im mostly concerned about meeting my self-imposed deadline for getting my book proposal out to agents. Yesterday, I had the thought that maybe deadlines are not good for something as creative as the book I’m writing. There’s so much work that needs to happen in connecting ideas, growing as a person and otherwise reaching the level of wisdom that I need to write with any sense of… authority isn’t really the right word… maybe the idea that I have a confidence in what I have to say to others.

The weekend is coming and that means I have to take a break from writing, which in my mind often means that the threads of thought I’ve been nurturing over the week are broken. I have this pattern called Interruptible Thought that is supposed to address that, but I rarely use my notebook in the way I used to. I’m not sure what kind of digital version I could use. I suppose, you just need to write somewhere your thoughts in process. Maybe this kind of system would work, though I think it’s more likely that something in Evernote would be more effective. Just a “random notes” kind of thing that you get in the habit of keeping so you’re not too concerned about fitting your ideas into categories.

I’m very excited about the digital garden that I’m building, and I think it would really be useful and make my writing better. It is a bit of a struggle, however, pulling stuff in from previous attempts at writing patterns. There’s a lot of editing that needs to be done, but I also think it’s valuable. I don’t want to throw all my old writing away, I want to use it to develop the ideas in the garden. In most cases, I’m trying to find the right seeds to plant, then integrating writing that overlaps or adds to what’s already there. Like I said, it’s difficult and slow work, but I think it will ultimately be valuable. I’m worried that the workflow is too tied to my computer and not easily done using my phone or iPad, but I think I’ll work that out eventually. I envision a time when I’ll just be writing directly into the system rather than pulling stuff from other places, and that seems like it will flow more.

My goal today is to rough out a description for the personal universe pattern. I came across a note by Buster (the co-maker of this website) who talked about his own theory that we’re all running a simulation of the universe in our minds that we use to make sense of the past present and to try to predict the future. Just in wording, a simulation of universe sounds a lot like “personal universe.” I wonder if those ideas are compatible in some way. My personal universe concept comes from Fuller’s (and others’) idea of Universe being the human experience of universe. That the aggregate of those experiences is what we call universe. My point was that if the aggregate of all experiences is Humanity’s universe, then each of us, as members of humanity, are keepers of our own little slice of the whole, our personal universe. And as such, it’s important that we work to make it as accurate and interconnected and comprehensive and flexible as possible and communicate it to others. I think of our personal universe as a collection of our experiences (or really our interpretations of our experiences), both first-hand and as communicated by others. That collection of experience somehow acts as a model of universe. Which is not very far from saying that it is the data that informs a simulation of universe within us. I definitely want to look more carefully at what Buster wrote about the simulation and see how that affects my own problems describing what personal universe is.

Really, the problem has been that I don’t know what the solution is. A pattern doesn’t just define an object, it describes how to improve it. So I suppose the whole process of making it more accurate, comprehensive, integrated and flexible are the solution. Or just a general goal of making it stronger by challenging it.