Recently there have 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, one that showed me how to tie a scarf, and another on how to use toilet paper properly. I've re-learned so many things recently it'd be embarrassing to continue.
So here I am, an almost - but at the time I started writing this not quite - 30 year old (re)learning how to tie my shoes and live life. For a quick second I thought I was some oddball outlier. But then I started to take a look around - like really looked closely at everything again - and I was surprised (in a not so surprised way) to see so many people re-learning how to tie their shows, for reals.
When it comes to basic tasks and activites from eating to excersing and thinking, my bet is that most of us learned how to do these things by simply just following along. Following whom? Our parents, siblings, relatives, teachers, and friends of course. And that's generally good enough. We learn a small, but crucial aspect of a task, and as we get older we develop and build out our skill/know how of that task.
Let's take 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 beyond, this idea of 'seperation' probably continued. Maybe you now keep an array of different pens to identify different subjects, or use a specific filing technique when you save notes and documents electronically or perhaps you have different sized post-its to catagorize different thoughts. Or maybe you are "that person" who meticulously labels mini-tabs before you stick then on pages like bookmarks with medieval metadata.
With this hypothetical example at least, the guiding philosophy - that thought at the center of what note taking (as we learned it) is - 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 your planner from last year? Trick question; it doesn't matter because even if you still have your old notebooks, or a hard drive full of documents, they have probably been left untouched. Everything written down or saved now remains lost and covered in that original seperation; such loss is built into and anticipated by the very way we learned to take notes.
Things are getting a little deep, no? I mean, I thought we were just talking about note taking right?! Well, we're about to get even deeper. We will now represent, symbolically, what note taking always has been but never thought of as being, what note taking has been to us, and what it could be in order to show a better way to take notes.
If you take a wide lens towards what note taking - or the recording of anything for that matter - has been throughout the history of humankind, it has simply been a long, running recording of thoughts & ideas. These recorded thoughts are all essentially functions: they are all linked to some specific thing (e.g. a passage in a book, a specifc topic, a particular lecture, an assignment, a to-do etc...). On top of that, over-arching relations run through these thoughts and ideas (e.g. time, place, a broad topic, a general thing, mood or behaviour). Much like a river, recorded notes pierce through time, are firmly connected with and touch their sorrounding environs and flow through space timelessly. This we can symbolize with the character '流'.
Now let's try to represent the essence of what note taking has been. The philosophy we etched out above should help. The driving force, the reason why we take notes is 'for some specific end' and thus we may re-present this idea with the symbol which has been used to convey acting for some things sake: '爲'.
Despite the shortcommings with taking notes focused solely on some specific end, it's hard to entirely refute the positive value or effect - however short lasting they may be - in our drive towards a better way. On the contrary, a synthesis should be what we strive for. Thus, for simplicity we can simply add a negation repesented with the symbol '無' to what we have thought note taking has been so that the resulting essence of the couplet is one where a specific end does not exist, but in the absence of such an end all ends are possible or '無爲'.
When all elements are combined we are left with '流無爲' or a flowing non-doing (i.e. not doing something for some specific end; doing something with all ends being possible without any any end being a direct impetus, focus nor a consideration of the original act). This is best exhibited in the 流無爲 note-taking app Diaro. Try it out. Use it. Carry it with you. Save it in the cloud. Add and update this flowing list across platforms and devices. Pay a little money to use it, forever. Give it to your children.
Basic tasks and how well we carry them out form the foundation of every other activity we engage in. If we can do basic things better, it would make sense that any unlocked efficiency could ripple through every other thing we do. Today, the best ways of doing things are readily available and shared through the internet. So, if we can learn the best way to do the basics, we no longer need to settle for what's simply been good enough.
