Morning Pages: May 20th, 2020

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the D.C. metro region has been in a state of lockdown. To alleviate fear and stress, my writer's group has put together a daily "morning pages" get-together on Zoom in order to touch base before starting the day. Here's some of my brief thoughts.

I love this music box! And the punch card that goes in! And everything else about this video!

I think it's really hard to keep my sleep cycle from flopping around, and I've found that I definitely get more hazy in the wee hours of the morning. I'm not quite sure if that's a bad thing in general, though, forgetting things. Before, I used to like collecting all kinds of knowledge, particularly around things I thought might be useful, and didn't change. But not a lot of that knowledge matters in the present moment, and in the moments surrounding it. Forgetting things is kind of the mind's way of telling us what's important and what isn't, and in that, I guess a kind of wisdom arises. Where mere intelligence is naive, wisdom has already walked the path.

I've also found myself liking ignorance more and more. Too much knowledge is a scary, alien thing to behold, better suited for books and computers, and having the ability to forget things and become childlike keeps us innocent and curious about the world we live in. I guess that's why I like writing, primarily as a way to record things down so I don't have to hold them in my brain, and I can rely on text search instead of mental search. Less knowledge, more wisdom.

Maybe this isn't such a good thing. I waffle back and forth. If I forget, who's there to remember for me? I think normalization of things we maybe shouldn't normalize is what happens when we do forget. But it sure as heck feels good.