Permission not to take notes
The competing voices in my head each sound reasonable. That’s the problem.
One voice is the keep-track-of-it voice. The one who wants to capture the precise moment with a picture or by writing down that perfectly turned phrase. This voice knows that someday when I stumble upon the preserved memory I’ll stop and take it in again. I’ll be so happy then that I kept it and can remember and relive it.
The other voice is the be-here-now voice. The one who wants to be fully immersed in the present experience, not with one eye on the future memory of the moment I’m still trying to have right now. This voice knows that whatever I remember, unaided, will be enough and just the thing I needed to know when the time comes and that, even if I can technically remember nothing from the present experience, it will have changed me somehow whether or not I can articulate or point to or recall it.
