As I go back through my notes, I am recognizing an important, significant fact: I would not have remembered 90% of the details of what I’ve been experiencing if I hadn’t written it down. I wouldn’t even have remembered all of my own reactions.
In my journal there are ideas for pieces of the dance collaboration that were completely discarded without a trace. There are narratives about the dance that were even tried out in the studio, right in front of me, and later replaced. There were quotes from a dancer or Erik that are completely familiar but otherwise lost except for the scrawl on the page. And that’s just the dance collaboration. There are conversations in Yellowstone and classroom visits and meeting notes and copious reactions to a dressage clinic scratched on an opposing page in a journal, is flooded with my own internal questions about what is going on.
There are two subsequent terrovelations*:
- I need to go back through all my notes, because there’s something there I won’t otherwise remember, and I won’t know which pieces were important until I’ve scooped them up and put them through a sieve.
- I can’t remember which of the things I didn’t write down I’m forgetting.
The moral, of course, is to write things down, and then read them again.
Perhaps blogs — even the bad ones — in addition to the notes and transcripts, have purpose after all.
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* My new word, a cross between a terror and a revelation.
