It can be easy to forget. Or rather, we can easily become overwhelmed and our private notes can be disregarded with the priorities and obligations life throws at us.

Learning in public, writing in public, and writing to learn — all mean that the work is done in such a way that it is, by default, easily accessible. To publicly document a journey means to have a place where you can return to easily. When your notes live in private Notion databases or scattered across Obsidian vaults, they become archaeology. When they live on your blog, they become reference material.

I will confess there was a good month or two that I was totally obsessed with personal knowledge management systems and note-taking. With the idea of having the most ideal system for my writing and keeping track of everything. I researched Zettelkasten, compared Obsidian versus Logseq, agonized over folder structures and linking strategies.

Those were some of my least productive months, writing-wise.

Because it is asking and answering the wrong question. It is the equivalent to trying to figure out what the most ideal vessel would be to collect the most rain instead of just finding water. Droughts happen if you aren't careful. You can spend so long optimizing the system that you forget to actually use it for the work it's meant to support.

I do have a personal knowledge management system now that I've been writing so much, and it's actually a total mess. I need to better organize my notes, fix the tag hierarchy, consolidate duplicates, archive the dead projects. But it is in a good enough place. Because what matters is I can pull what I need to pull when I write. The system serves the writing, not the other way around.

Blogging as Container

I think blog posts are wonderful because they are neat containers. You can fit a specific concept, a specific thesis unto them and you will be easily reminded whether you already wrote on a topic or not. That doesn't mean you can't write on the same thing multiple times, I've written about the current state of the internet and AI's mediocrity problem from different angles, for example. But rather that you can avoid reinventing the wheel for yourself. You can build on previous thinking instead of starting from scratch every time.

Each blog post becomes a node in your thinking, a waypoint you can return to. As I wrote about in my essay on mise en place for writers, having everything in its place means you spend less time searching and more time creating.

Why Writing Matters

I love writing. I think it's really wonderful how accessible it is as an artform and a hobby. You need nothing but paper and pen, or a text editor and time. No expensive equipment, no studio space, no materials that run out. Just you and the words.

I would absolutely advocate for people to pick up other hobbies as well, whether it is drawing or reading or volunteering, but to write (and more specifically, blogging) means we are intentionally cultivating our character and thoughts to articulate them to the world. As Annie Dillard wrote,

"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives."

Writing publicly is choosing to spend your days in deliberate reflection.

In the realms of fiction, it means deeply creating worlds and people and figuring out what happens. In the realms of creative non-fiction, it means research and finding meaning in things that might have otherwise not felt as though they had meaning. Joan Didion famously said,

"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means."

Despite the consistent and ongoing enshittification of so many different products and services, there are so many online resources for learning whatever you want. Khan Academy, Coursera, edX, YouTube creators who teach for free, The Public Domain Review, Internet Archive, countless open-source projects and IndieWeb communities. The Internet is still a place of utility and good, despite it all.

I think that's reflective of human nature and our humanity. We are facing so much suffering and grief, yet we are still here, yet we still have each other. Rebecca Solnit writes in Hope in the Dark,

"Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency."

For the new year, I am starting again. It is very exciting to start again. Revelations are sometimes aspirational the way breathing is literally aspirational: aspire comes from the Latin aspirare, meaning "to breathe upon." There are cycles and reoccurrence and pattern.

I constantly recalibrate, start from the beginning, take stock of what I already have. It is ritual. It is ceremony. It is religion. If we figured out everything permanently and never returned back to the source there would be no breathing. No rhythm. No pulse.

People perform the same prayer every day, people perform the same festival or ceremony every year. It never loses value from its repetition and never loses meaning from its repetition. We are pattern-seeking creatures. It is built into our biology, wired into our neurology. There is the story and the narrative, and it informs how we process, how our brains function on a physical level.

You make the bed every morning and you clean and you relearn the same lessons and you tell the same stories. Novelty is fetishized. Novelty allows capitalism to constantly sell you something new that you don't already have. But the circular and cyclical nature of all things is very integrated in Indigenous ways of knowing.

As my Métis heritage teaches, the end is built into the beginning. I returned to the beginning the way I slowly approached the end. They happen at the same time and they can only happen at the same time. The Medicine Wheel represents the continuous circle, the four directions, the seasons cycling through each other eternally.

And it is also just good intellectual humility. Do you think the best athletes practice the most complex difficult manoeuvres constantly? No, they perform the basic foundational moves the most. Kobe Bryant's 4 AM workouts weren't about flashy dunks, rather, they were about footwork, free throws, fundamentals.

You have to break it down. What exactly do you want changed? When you say you want to totally change your life, you're not actually pointing at anything and that's why nothing changes. You have these big feelings, and this feels like a big revelation, and thus it feels as though it can change a large amount of things profoundly simply because of the phenomenological nature of the thought. But feelings aren't blueprints.

There are things that are not in our control, but funnily enough the amount that we think is in our control can actually change what is in our control. The locus of control isn't fixed. It shifts based on how we understand our agency. There can be times where you forget that you and your emotions are separate. You and your identity and your character are steadfast and the emotions, especially the ones that feel existential or hopeless, are not you and they do not control any part of you.

You eat an elephant one piece at a time. (Or, if you're vegetarian like me, you eat a metaphorical elephant one piece at a time.) What would need to be done step-by-step for you to eat healthier or for your room to be more clean? Not the fantasy version where you suddenly transform overnight, but the actual steps. Monday: buy vegetables. Tuesday: chop vegetables. Wednesday: cook vegetables. Repeat.

This too, is part of the intellectual humility and beginner's mind. It's to really break down the pieces you feel don't need to be broken down because you feel that you inherently understand things at a much more advanced level. As Shunryu Suzuki writes in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind,

"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few."

The Buddhist middle way is understanding that things can be better as they are without having to reach an impossibly high ideal. You do not need to achieve perfection and you also do not need to live at a very low standard simply because that perfection is unachievable.

This is why I'm starting brennan.day even though I have other sites, even though I've failed before. This is why I'm writing this post even though it's rambling and imperfect. This is why I'm publishing it even though I could polish it more.

Because the middle way says good enough is good enough. The work exists. The container is built. Now I just have to keep showing up and filling it.

And so I will. Again and again. Like breathing. Like seasons. Like the medicine wheel turning, endlessly returning to the beginning that is also the end.