Capturing everything

“…survival lies in sanity, and sanity lies in paying attention.”
Julia Cameron “The Artist’s Way“

The idea of taking notes to capture the events of our lives is controversial from the standpoint of present moment awareness. On the one hand, the vary act of note taking can be distracting from the experience itself. On the other hand, it can serve as a focusing tool.

In a recent interview, a comedian Mike Birbiglia said that an advice that he would give to his younger self was to write everything down in a journal “because it’s all so fleeting”. Basically, I think that the value of journaling boils down to cultivating the skills of observation. Julia Cameron in “The Artist’s Way” makes a case that paying attention is a key skill in any creative endeavour. Perhaps, it is a key in everything: relationships, work, memory, creativity, etc.

Last year, I went to the Leonardo3 exhibit in Milan, where Da Vinci’s notebooks were displayed. Those were e-copies; the real ones were displayed at the Santa Maria delle Grazie, which is also the cite of “The Last Supper”. My most prominent impression was of Leonardo’s incredible ability to observe nature and to learn from it. If I think about it a bit more, it becomes apparent that he must have been very generous with his time. He must have had sufficient patience to just look at things (e.g. turbulent water flow under a bridge or frogs swimming in a puddle) and figure out why they look and work the way they are. After all, Leonardo did all his work before computers and productivity tools. Yet undeniably, he had been tremendously productive. I think that perhaps, it was a conjunction of two key factors: patiently paying attention and diligent capturing of his experiences and observations.