On Memory and the Persistence of Good Ideas
The greatest tragedy, in my opinion, is losing memories. The poet Dylan Thomas’ father was a Shakespeare-loving teacher who was an aspiring poet himself. As Thomas watched his elderly father degrade peacefully in his last days, he shouted at him in verse to “Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.” But when you’ve forgotten or given up on what you used to be passionate about, it becomes hard to bring forth that same energy.
The memories that we have are copies of copies of the initial experience. Every time we load the memory in our brain, it loses a little bit of the vibrancy and detail it had in the days after. The same can be true for ideas, if you only take them out to admire them and don’t build on them. And when we lock thoughts in our brain vaults and don’t return to them, they either emerge as mere glimmers of a sensation years later, or are lost forever.
The solution, then, to keeping that initial spark glowing is to do something with it while the iron is hot: write it down, build the framework, tell someone about it. You may not be able to bring it to its fullest potential right away, but if you capture enough of it in a bottle you can pick it up later and follow your own instructions.
Until the library of Alexandria burns and you lose everything.
My particular brain-library is prone to be leaky. I have inattentive ADHD, which makes me less likely to pay attention to the right thing, and I have fewer slots in my short-term memory so not everything makes it to long-term conversion. As a result, I’ve learned to write everything down. In classes, I write down the professors’ every word, complete with relevant doodles of the images shown or alluded to. Studies have proven that taking long-form notes helps you to retain information better (2014, 2021), but for me, it’s mostly so that a) I’m actively listening and not daydreaming, and b) I have something physical to return to in order to bring that information back into my memory. My brain isn’t likely to remember proper nouns—it’s rare for me to contribute to a conversation without an awkward pause as I realize mid-sentence that I’m blanking on the most important word.
For someone like me to hold onto an idea long enough to actually make it happen is huge. But waiting this long to start artinministry.com hasn’t come without a cost. In high school and college, I kept pages and pages of notes on topics for the future AIM blog in my computer. The notes software was backed up to the cloud, but I let it stay unsynced for too many months and I lost nearly all of it when my computer died. Some ideas I wrote down on slips of paper which went with me through every move in my adult life (and I moved nearly every year for six years) but I couldn’t find them when I needed them. Even in the middle of making Art in Ministry a reality, I neglected to back up my iPad notes before my hyperfocus on learning handlettering ran the battery to the ground. Not only that, but the reason I was so fired up about art advocacy—the lack of creative fulfillment in our Lutheran schools—wasn’t as relevant to me personally anymore, because as a second career student at Bethany Lutheran College I had the opportunity to try my hand at all the artistic endeavors I had craved ten years earlier.
I’ve heard the strategy of some people is to let ideas be—don’t write them down, don’t do anything with them, just entertain them in the moment and let them go. If they keep coming back and you remember what they were, those are the ideas worth keeping, and that’s what you run with. I struggle with accepting that mentality, because what if I never remember my ideas a second time? Plus, if you only follow through with the ideas that are the most “worthy” of implementation, you pass over so many ideas that help you develop your creative muscle. At the end of my life, I don’t want to be the person who had ideas but never acted on them because they weren’t practical.
I think that’s what will help me to get over mourning the ideas I may have lost along the way. What I end up making may not be exactly the same flavor of the original ideas I had when I was in the throes of artistic martyrdom. But the essence will still be there, and all the better for existing in the real world and not just in my head. It will simply be a more mature look from the perspective of someone who wanted to be an English and art teacher, became one, and then decided to learn how to create in order to help others know how to be creative.
At the end of my life, I don’t want to be the person who had ideas but never acted on them because they weren’t practical.
Creator Resource
One way to keep track of ideas is to always have onhand a “parking lot” for your thoughts so that you can jot them down before you forget them while not interrupting your current task. This could be a pad of paper, sketchbook, or an app on your phone. I’ve created a simple notebook that you can print out & fold zine-style using a single sheet of paper. It has a space to mark the date at the top, and a place to tally how many times you’ve gone back to look at your notes. If you’ve reviewed it enough times to fill up the tally box, it’s probably time to put that idea into action!
Download the Parking Lot Notebook for free on Teachers Pay Teachers