If you are afflicted by something you do not understand I think a good first step is to identify it.
Failing that, giving it your own name lets you reconstruct it from the features you do know about it
A group of campers get lost in the woods and every night are attacked by something.
The campers give the something a name. "The Creature"
They now have an anchor point where they can begin to describe what they know about The Creature.
After having some nights where they sleep in shifts and try different things they have a list of features:
The Creature:
Only attacks at night
Is scared of light
Does not attack when more then one person is awake
They now have a strategy to keep safe from the enemy! Yay!
Describing the emotions you are experiencing can be confusing.
Emotions are kind of like colors in the way that hard definitions fall apart in the face of slight adjustments.
How much can you shift the hue before red becomes orange?
Is the love you feel for your friend the same as the one you feel for your lover? Your pet? Your family?
This can feel a bit pointless as an area of enquiry but where it becomes useful is emotions that hinder or hurt us.
When you name an emotion it goes from an amorphous feeling to a tangible it.
When an emotion becomes "an it" you can assign features to it
When you know what It is called you can know how it works
When you know how It works you can control it
When you can control It you can free yourself
I did not know where to put this but theres this Mr Rogers song called "What do you do with the Mad that you Feel?" that I think is really neat.
I bring it up here because of the capitalisation of the word "Mad"
The Mad becomes a tangible thing that you can control and I think that is neat.
I read the introduction of A System of Writing and it was pretty neat.
I do have a pretty good definition of "Zettelkasten" now.
The intro has a couple sentences that go "A Zettelkasten is..." but the one that describes the methodology is the one I will share.
The Zettelkasten Methodology:
Capture ideas in the form of fleeting or reference notes
Turn captures into main notes
Establish connections between main notes
Keep track of developing trains of thought in hub notes, structure notes and indexes
Turn these trains of thought into writing
The book says you can get started by getting something to record your thoughts as they arise and getting either a digital zettelkasten app like obsidian or buy a stack of index cards and a physical slip box.
I am deeply intrigued by the physical zettelkasten but I will refrain from it because I imagine it is not as scalable as a digital zettelkasten.
Yay! Yay!! Thanks for reading yay!!