What Evenings & Eons Are Made Of

How to capture the fleeting thoughts bouncing around in your brain box.

I don’t know about you, but I often feel like my thoughts are little birds flapping around inside my brain that I can’t quite catch. Sometimes it’s sort of fun to chase them around; other times it’s incredibly frustrating! Either way, writing these thoughts down — however incomplete they might be — seems to be the best way to help me to decode them later.

Aside from decoding the chaos in my brain, I find that simply writing something down gives me permission to relax. It’s like I’m freeing up brain space. I do this with boring things I want to remember, like groceries or errands. But a much more satisfying application is when I have a random thought, or creative idea, or a string of words zipping through my synapses. When that happens, I try to write it down, even if it’s silly. It’s super basic, but here’s my sure-fire 2- to 3-step process for capturing brain chaos:

Step 1: Keep a capturing device on hand! (I often use my phone’s notes app or a good ol’ fashioned notebook.)

Step 2: When a feeling strikes me or a thought won’t stop bouncing around in my brain, I write it down. I try not to evaluate the thought or feeling at this point, because if I did I’d never write down anything at all! So a lot of my notebook pages look like a giant mess, which is fine!

Sometimes I stop here if I’m just trying to minimize brain noise, but usually I continue to step three.

Step 3: At some point in the future, I look back at what I captured. Does anything about it strike me? No? Let it simmer (perhaps for eternity!). Yes? Then I use that little nugget as a jumping off point.

As an example, here’s an incoherent mess that came pouring out of my brain one night. This particularly ragged version of my handwriting means I was either super tired or trying to get the thoughts down super fast… or both!

Honestly, it’s a little embarrassing, but it perfectly illustrates my point about capturing messy ideas! When I came back to it a few days later, I decided it was mostly garbage minus this handful of lines:

these split seconds
and sideways glances
are what evenings
and eons
are made of

I briefly tried to expand it into a longer and more cohesive poem, but I kind of liked the incomplete feeling it left me with… like I can’t quite capture the magic of an evening or interaction no matter how hard I try. So I wrote it as-is onto an in-progress page in the poetry sketchbook I introduced last week. It turned into this:

Beyond remembering things, here are four reasons I like to write writing down my brain chatter:

1. Self-Collaboration — It gives me the power to collaborate with past and future versions of myself!

2. Decoding & Discovery — It allows me to think on the page. By writing down the beginning of a thought, I can move forward and expand on it more easily, and maybe eventually write myself to what I really want to say.

3. Permission to Relax — Once it’s written down, I don’t have to hold it in my brain! Then I can chill out and move on.

4. Fueling the Idea Pool — I love having a little pool of ideas that I can dip into. It gives me a place to turn to when I feel like I have zero ideas. It also gives me a way to guide my thoughts back to something I actually want to think about versus, you know, spiraling on something negative or repetitive, non-useful, draining, etc. That’s when my little collage of random notes becomes a treasure trove of “oh yeah… I could do something with that.” And then I write it in my notebook or sketch out some visual ideas and see what happens.

Thanks for reading!

Thanks for being here! It truly means the world to me to connect with you every week. In case you missed it, last week I wrote about readiness. You can check out that post here.

Paid subscribers, please keep scrolling to download an art print version of the sketchbook page shown above!