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Sep. 12th, 2022 02:06 amToday I made a note about my yoga practice in my Zettelkasten. Two weeks ago I did not have a yoga practice or a Zettelkasten, and... I want to write 'at this rate I'll probably have attained enlightenment before you know it', only these are both such proselytized things I'm mildly concerned it wouldn't scan as a joke.
I didn't come to either through proselytizing. In what seems to be the way of systems which actually help, when I ran into them I felt like I'd already been trying to invent them - like when![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
leaflemming observed Seahearth and our childhood friend trying to recreate the computer game Diablo on grids we'd ruled onto cardboard, and introduced us to Dungeons & Dragons.
Yoga arose from talking with my therapist, only my therapist's tack was to refer to yoga a couple of times as 'that annoyingly effective thing I do *not* tell everybody to go out and do' - so sooner or later of course I tried it, and then she told me 'Now, if you are trying it, maybe try the Yoga with Adriene youtube channel instead of whatever the one you found is that's causing pain in your top vertebra.'
I am known to be sheepdog-like. Often my body says 'you need physical movement, stop whatever you're doing and fix it or we'll be sad together'; my response has sometimes been to step aside from the table during family card games to jump up and down, and sometimes to go for a long walk, but yoga seems to address this feeling of jitteriness to a greater degree, and quicker - and what's more, it often leaves me giggling with sheer physical sense of rightness. Adriene, like my old piano teacher, is good at intuitive metaphors for ways to move muscles the student may not even know the names of yet, good at encouraging me to move safely and comfortable and explore sensation instead of attaining a shape because the shape is proper. Yoga also has the advantage of being doable when it's bucketing down outside - although when the deck's wet there is a degree of shuffling around, because my room's free floor space is only just as long as I am.
...
The Zettelkasten, on the other hand, I was introduced to here, by a post which only partly explains what it is. Then I opened one of the links to an implementation of it and got the words A SECOND BRAIN, FOR YOU, FOREVER in the middle of the page in large white text. I don't yet know whether what I've downloaded is A SECOND BRAIN, FOR ME, FOREVER - perhaps we've just been having good weather - but what it certainly is is a system of linking lots of little notes, such that they can either be viewed from above as a cloud of links and nodes or moved about within. I'm writing in it now, in a node which links to 'yoga', 'blog post compost', and for reasons I forget just now, 'Tony poem 25'. There's a good feeling of nettedness I get when I write a diary and read back over and annotate it later, or when I write to-do lists for stories I have in progress. But then I forget which diary the to-do list is in, or if it's on paper I lose it under a pile of books, and by the time I find it I don't want to use it. Navigating The Zettelkasten feels more like thinking than any note-taking system I've previously tried - at university, each year, I used a different system and then mostly ignored it. But this one is very low-friction. I've been worrying all year about my tendency to get stuck and not do things and default to dissociation - I got deeply depressed around February-March, the kind of thing where I'd blink and a week would've passed, hence therapist - but this makes it feel like less of me was going wrong than I thought - just this particular interstitial bit, the one that jumps and parcels - and here's a brace for that. While it doesn't in and of itself fix any other bad habits I have, it's been disconcerting but pleasant to find myself staying up too late on my computer because I'm too interested in things, instead of the reverse.
I didn't come to either through proselytizing. In what seems to be the way of systems which actually help, when I ran into them I felt like I'd already been trying to invent them - like when
leaflemming observed Seahearth and our childhood friend trying to recreate the computer game Diablo on grids we'd ruled onto cardboard, and introduced us to Dungeons & Dragons.Yoga arose from talking with my therapist, only my therapist's tack was to refer to yoga a couple of times as 'that annoyingly effective thing I do *not* tell everybody to go out and do' - so sooner or later of course I tried it, and then she told me 'Now, if you are trying it, maybe try the Yoga with Adriene youtube channel instead of whatever the one you found is that's causing pain in your top vertebra.'
I am known to be sheepdog-like. Often my body says 'you need physical movement, stop whatever you're doing and fix it or we'll be sad together'; my response has sometimes been to step aside from the table during family card games to jump up and down, and sometimes to go for a long walk, but yoga seems to address this feeling of jitteriness to a greater degree, and quicker - and what's more, it often leaves me giggling with sheer physical sense of rightness. Adriene, like my old piano teacher, is good at intuitive metaphors for ways to move muscles the student may not even know the names of yet, good at encouraging me to move safely and comfortable and explore sensation instead of attaining a shape because the shape is proper. Yoga also has the advantage of being doable when it's bucketing down outside - although when the deck's wet there is a degree of shuffling around, because my room's free floor space is only just as long as I am.
...
The Zettelkasten, on the other hand, I was introduced to here, by a post which only partly explains what it is. Then I opened one of the links to an implementation of it and got the words A SECOND BRAIN, FOR YOU, FOREVER in the middle of the page in large white text. I don't yet know whether what I've downloaded is A SECOND BRAIN, FOR ME, FOREVER - perhaps we've just been having good weather - but what it certainly is is a system of linking lots of little notes, such that they can either be viewed from above as a cloud of links and nodes or moved about within. I'm writing in it now, in a node which links to 'yoga', 'blog post compost', and for reasons I forget just now, 'Tony poem 25'. There's a good feeling of nettedness I get when I write a diary and read back over and annotate it later, or when I write to-do lists for stories I have in progress. But then I forget which diary the to-do list is in, or if it's on paper I lose it under a pile of books, and by the time I find it I don't want to use it. Navigating The Zettelkasten feels more like thinking than any note-taking system I've previously tried - at university, each year, I used a different system and then mostly ignored it. But this one is very low-friction. I've been worrying all year about my tendency to get stuck and not do things and default to dissociation - I got deeply depressed around February-March, the kind of thing where I'd blink and a week would've passed, hence therapist - but this makes it feel like less of me was going wrong than I thought - just this particular interstitial bit, the one that jumps and parcels - and here's a brace for that. While it doesn't in and of itself fix any other bad habits I have, it's been disconcerting but pleasant to find myself staying up too late on my computer because I'm too interested in things, instead of the reverse.
