First Blog

If you consider all the knowledge, abilities, skills, and memories people possess, you note enormous knowledge resources contained by society, but maintained by individual agents.   However, when one of these agents passes, this information is abruptly lost forever. Not reclaimable, redeemable, or reconstructible, it is just gone.   For example, the unrecorded thoughts of Socrates, Kant, and others are gone forever. Sir Isaac Newton, on the other hand, wrote thousands of words on his ideas in multiple notebooks (many bizarre). Every day, individual deaths carry vast amounts of lost knowledge, factual, operational, skills, and data.   Over all time, you have wealth and knowledge, but you can’t take either along.   You can leave behind wealth but not your knowledge.   Your mind, with its lifetime of accumulations, is often the more valuable. What you know uniquely is lost and must be rediscovered. So very much of my parents has been lost forever. Such is the tragic loss

Some years ago I began writing my thoughts in small notebooks. They were entered as I considered them.  It was not daily, weekly or anything on a time schedule.  When I returned to them months or years afterwards I was amazed.  I came to understand my thoughts, how my mind worked, and how my thinking had changed.  Working definitions:  A diary is a record of events, indications, and particularly feelings made daily or at least regularly.  A journal is more like an account of events, thoughts, or ideas made intermittently.There are lots of these: Travel journals, Diet journals, Workout diaries, Sleep diaries, Tagebuch, War diaries, Fictional diaries, and Unusual diaries.  Some are just newsy, a sharing with friends.  Naturally, many if not most politicians keep diaries and/or journals of their encounters with other politicians, in person or by phone. Have I created a diary?  Not quite.  My notes are more like a journal.    People make them for a variety of reasons.  Some are for