This challenge of helping A+ figure out how to make sense of things and convert that understanding into a form her teacher can grade is similar to something I've been working on for many years. My mind finds it hard to settle on one topic. It likes to jump from one thing to another. I'm learning to accept that. I like writing non-linearly. I like connecting ideas. To write something sensible, I sometimes need to summarize ideas enough so that I can fit them within my working memory. (In one blog post? On one page? On their own index cards?) Too much cognitive load means the ideas fall apart. There's no getting around intrinsic cognitive load, but sometimes it's easier to look at smaller chunks. I can get around extraneous cognitive load by rewriting or redrawing things to cut out the fluff, like the way business books are padded with lots of filler. Managing my germane load–my working memory, the particular ways of encoding the knowledge into schemas in my head or in my notes that will work for my brain–is the work I get to focus on.

I use blog posts, sketches, and hyperlinks to chunk thoughts into building blocks. Then I need to figure out the order I want to discuss them in. It's difficult to run a single coherent line through the ideas. Sometimes I experiment with tangents in side notes or collapsible sections. Sometimes I can't get the ideas all straightened out. Sketchnotes and maps sometimes help show the spatial relationship between ideas, when I can squish things down into two(ish) dimensions.²

Even if I had all the continuous quiet time I wanted, I'd still need these rough notes to get things out of my head and into a form I can look at. It's okay for them to not be coherent and polished. I figure out what I think by writing and drawing. This is the doing of it. Other people's essays also evolve out of notes that are gradually fleshed out. There's hope for it yet. Slosh enough mnemonic slurry around in various buckets, and something interesting might precipitate. The idea of an atomic note is nice, but I'm not there yet. For now, I think I'm better off letting my mind explore these branches instead of pruning things down to a singular focus.

It's reassuring to know that I'm not the only one whose mind wants to go down all the different paths. In "The utility of digressions," Ruben Schade wrote:

In my original post I joked that my blog is often full of nonsensical or meandering digressions. This is because I have an odd sense of humour, but it’s also fun making connections between disparate things. … Digressions and tangents are one of the key ways that human writing is interesting. I’ve gone down so many wonderful rabbitholes just by reading a digression note on a blog I first read because we had a common interest.

Maybe it's okay to leave these little signposts in case someone wants to take those forks in the path.

This reminded me of busybody, hunter, and dancer archetypes for curiosity. Sometimes people are curious about lots of different things, like a bee visiting different flowers. Sometimes people are focused on a particular topic and want to know as much as they can about it. Sometimes the joy is in the leap from one topic to another, like when interesting blog posts are juxtaposed in my feed reader or my to-think-about list³.

Connecting one sentence to another is the job of the transition words that A+ learns about in class: first, then, finally. My connections tend to be along the lines of "Similarly…." It's easy for me to connect the ideas that feel the same.

"But" is an interesting transition word I want to use more. It surprises. I wonder where I can practise noticing when two ideas contrast, especially when two seemingly-contradictory things can be true,⁴ or when there's a general idea but a specific exception. It's not just about looking for an opposite, but thinking more critically about things and seeing the gaps. To practise this, though, I have to be comfortable with writing more for myself than for readers who might not be able to follow the uncertain not-quite-trails I meander down. I'm in good company. Jerry's Brain is quite the knowledgebase, but it might be hard for anyone to use if they're not Jerry. It's better to start, even when the beginning is awkward and I know I'll still need to slog through the plateau of mediocrity.

Henrik Karlsson's recent preview of a paywalled post on agentic fragments had this:

Where I saw a sweater, she saw a thread temporarily shaped as one—it could just as well be a scarf, a pair of socks, a hat, or six gloves. She saw more degrees of freedom than I did, and acted on it.

… which branched off myriad thoughts: MacGyver, my dad's Swiss Army Knife, Henrik's essay on agency? The fun of building things in Emacs, the things I love about free/libre/open source software, the master builder scenes in The LEGO Movie? The way my sister unravels her health challenges and turns them into poignant reflections? Sewing and re-making things, Jacob Lund Fisker's book Early Retirement Extreme, and the skills I want to get better at?⁵ (Even though I'm starting to have more time for myself, I don't find myself using that time for practising sewing or picking up woodworking again. If anything, at the moment, I'm probably focused on getting by with less stuff instead of more.) Maybe this will eventually be multiple posts, like the way I responded to the IndieWeb Carnival theme of "Take Two" with three posts.⁶ Maybe I need to lightly sketch out my thoughts with drawings and words until I figure out what I want to say, like moving index cards around on the floor.

I wonder what better could look like. There's that meme of connecting the dots, when someone is trying to show a complex theory in an incoherent way. When connections are too lightly supported or too overwhelming in number, it only makes sense to me and not to other people. (Maybe not even to my future self.) A good connection, on the other hand, might lead to "Hmm, I hadn't thought of it that way," or maybe the insights you can get by extending a metaphor. Like when you start to fill in a visual framework and it guides you to think about things you might have missed. Mashing up ideas can reveal different aspects of them: similarities, differences, gaps.

There's something here, I think. A digression doesn't have to be to something I know. A connection can be to an amorphous question I haven't fleshed out. If I mash ideas together with enough energy, what particles come out of the collision? If I connect the ideas that feel similar, can I begin to sense the lacunae, the questions I may want to ask? Here are more signposts to things I'm still figuring out: not so much "Here there be dragons," but pointers to territory I've yet to explore.