**rough draft**
Recently there gave been a slew of articles that made me feel like a kid again. There was an article that taught me how to tie my shoes [link], one that showed me how to tie a scarf [link], and another about the best way to fold toilet paper [link]. I've re-learned so many things recently that it'd be almost embarrassing to continue.
How funny is that image? An almost - but not quite - 30 year old learning how to tie his shoes; I think anyone would laugh out loud if they saw that in real life. But, if you look around - and I mean really look closely - I think you may be surprised to find how many people are actually re-learning how to tie their shoes, metaphorically that is.
When it comes to basic tasks and activities like eating, excercising and thinking, all of us have a specific method we employ to carry out each activity. My bet is that for such '"basic" activities, most of us simply learned how to do those things (i.e. basic methods) by simply following along. Following whom? We learned by following parents, siblings, relatives, teachers and friends of course. And that's generally good enough. We learn a basic method based on a simple principle (e.g. ' Over, under, pull it tight;
make a bow, pull it through to do it right', chew before you swallow) and as we ger older we may stick to the basic method or build out more advanced techniques a top it.
Let's use the the example of note taking as a case-in-point. Most learn to take notes in elementary school or middle school. We were advised to keep seperate notebooks for each specific subject. As we matriculated through high school, university and beyong, this idea of 'seperation' probably continued. Maybe you now keep an array of different pens to identify notes on different subjects, or use a specific filing technique when you save notes and documents electronically or perhaps have different sized post-its to categorize different thoughts or mini-tabs you stick on pages to help you find what you read or wrote.
With this hypothetical example at least, the guiding philosophy - that thought at the center of what note taking as we learned it - has been 'seperation of different thoughts and ideas for some specific purpose'. And it works, up to a point. How many of you still have your notebooks from middle school let alone from university or even you Samsung planner from last year? My guess is not many. Even if some of you still have your old notebooks, or have a hard drive full of documents, they have probably been left untouched, if not lost. But is being left untouched just another kind of loss anyways? Thus it would seem that loss is either built into and anticipated in the method of note taking we learned that embraces 'seperation' at its core.
Things are getting a little deep, no? I thought we were talking about note taking right?! Well, we're about to get even deeper. we're about to represent the essence of what note taking has been as a symbol. If we think back to what we said is the philosophy of note taking is (the seperation of different thoughts and ideas for some specific purpose) it should be clear that the driving force, the reason why we have taken notes is 'for some specific end' and thus we may use the following symbol: '爲'.
So now that we have symbolized what note taking has been, let's think about what note taking is, broadly. To define note taking as bluntly as possible, I would say: note taking is simply a long, running recording of thoughts and ideas. Thought broadly, recorded thoughts and ideas are all essentially functions; they are all linked to some specific thing (e.g. a passage in a book, a specific topic, a particular lecture, an assignment, a to-do etc...). On top of that, there are over-arching relations that run through these thoughts and ideas (e.g. broad topics, general ideas).
