A non-linear mind

More than ten years ago I was in a unit meeting, taking notes as usual. As the meeting drew to a close, one of my colleagues said she had noticed me writing and asked if I could share my notes.

Of course, I said. But I warned her first: they are written the way my mind works. Not a list of points in the order they were said, but a sprawling mind map. Some branches lead back to what was said in the room. Others lead out to things I had connected it to along the way: an earlier project, a half-finished task, something I had read months before.

I shared them anyway. Her comment afterwards was short, and spot on:

“You have a non-linear mind.”

I have thought about that sentence many times since. It named something I had always done without having a word for it. My mind does not file knowledge, events and thoughts in separate drawers. It connects them, often across domains that seemingly have nothing to do with each other.

The memory came back to me while building this site. I realised I was structuring it in exactly the same fashion. It is not a blog with posts in date order, but a web of ideas, projects, stories and memories, each linked to the others by why they belong together.

For a long time, the tools did not really let me build that. Now, with AI, I finally can: a system that holds things the way I think about them. My hope is that following those connections will be useful to someone else too.