December 22, 2024

Reflections on lost ideas | Kev in Progress #1

Kevin shares the power of reflection in understanding past ideas.

My strategies to remember my ideas

Everyone's thoughts are ephemeral, but if you know me, you know my memory is substantially worse than the average bear's. Knowing this about myself, I have devised several methods of capturing those quick ideas that pop into my head. I record voice memos with a shortcut on my lock screen, I can quickly type something in the Drafts app, and I sometimes add things to a "Writing Topics List" or "Research Topics and Project Ideas Brainstorming" list in Obsidian. In ascending order, these lists represent the thought put into the idea and the amount of time I have to capture the thought. Basically, my "solid" and "good" ideas that I have a non-zero probability of returning to live in one of my two Obsidian lists.

Recently, I was looking back through my writing topics list to see what Kev was cooking, and I saw this:

2024-01-11-Thursday - Binding vows, announcing plans (Al Swearengen), and Pharaoh Sanders.

To anyone who is not me, or maybe my brother Jared, any one of these words or phrases may appear unintelligible. Admittedly, even I don't know what I meant by all three of these together together.

Trying to retrace my thoughts

I understand my train of thought with Binding Vows and Al Swearengen: A binding vow is a technique in which a person makes a pact with themselves or others to increase their power in return for abiding by the rules of the said pact. As an illustration, consider two boxers in the ring, where one boxer says, "I'm only using the right hand and I'm only jabbing". Boxer 2 has a serious advantage now that they know the limitations of Boxer 1's ability and strategy, however, a binding vow makes it such that if that right jab hits, Boxer 2 will certainly be knocked out, for good. Contrastingly, Al Swearengen says, "Announcing your plans is a good way to hear God laugh." So, my idea was to reconcile the paradox between there being power in describing your technique and strategy, while also describing the futility in trying to see and understand God's plans.

Then there's Pharaoh Sanders.

(A little bit of) self-disparagement

I was puzzled at how Pharoah Sanders, legendary spiritual jazz saxophonist fit into this idea I had. I laughed at my silly attempt to create lists of silly ideas. I looked at the other items on my list and was disappointed, convinced that even these "upper echelon", well-thought-out ideas were still mediocre and half-baked. Silly me for even trying to think and have ideas, who did I think I was?

Writing + Reflecting = ?

But I was writing - writing, reflecting, and retracing my thoughts led to a revelation! As I wrote the line, "So, my idea was to reconcile the paradox between there being power in describing your technique and strategy, while also describing the futility in trying to see and understand God's plans." I wanted to instead end this sentence with, "while also describing the futility in trying to see and understand the Creator's Master Plan."

Maybe only the other 0.05% of Spotify users and I will understand the significance of that rephrasing, but for the rest of you, Pharoah Sanders has a song titled The Creator Has A Master Plan with a runtime of 32 minutes and 47 seconds. While I wish to describe the actual content of the song in later writing, I will briefly say that the song is a beautiful, scary, and joyful reminder that The Creator Has A Master Plan for all. And that God, family, and friends have "kept you" through dangers seen and unseen.

Around January 11th, 2024 (the day I had that idea), I was in the midst of some of the heaviest trauma I have ever experienced. I ran The Creator Has A Master Plan and many other Pharoah Sanders songs on repeat for much of the first quarter of the year. I made a playlist inspired by the healing spirit found in his horn (and the eccentricity of Spotify's Daylists). In retrospect, it's funny (in a disappointing and mostly sad way²) how these ideas whose importance and meaning were painfully obvious to me a little less than a year ago could be cast aside as worthless now and be ammo for my self-deprecation machine. Without reflection, even my ideas borne from pain were deemed not good enough.

Given my proclivity to disparage my ideas after this initial period, I see now that I must work to remember why any given idea I deemed worthy of writing down was a worthwhile idea. This is not to say that all my ideas are worth a thousand words, but that I owe it to myself to respect Kev of the past enough to reflect on my old ideas before scrapping them.

Maybe I should write and reflect regularly?

I'm encouraged that by sitting down to write and reflect on what the heck I meant by "Binding vows, announcing plans (Al Swearengen) and Pharoah Sanders", I was able to retrieve the original connection from the depths of my Emersonian mind¹ and reflect on the change in myself from January 11th, 2024 to now. This was not the direction I intended for this piece, but I believe ultimately exemplifies what I intended: there is power in reflection, that is impossible to grasp without doing the work.

Reflection can lead to the renaissance of a prior thought, one that was seen as valuable enough to be written or recorded, yet forgotten or lost to time. Reconnecting with the past self in this way is a form of healing. The more I can connect Kev of today to Kev of last year or Kev of five years ago, the more I can understand myself and reconcile divergences between these selves that had different priorities and concerns.

My partner Gabby recently asked me what my hopes and dreams were and while I had a weak answer for her ("to be happy") I do know that one way of making that tangible is by respecting and embracing the Kev of the past.

This, in part, is why I have moved towards referring to things as "in progress", even myself. I am working towards methods and acts of making myself happy, DJing, writing, yoga, research, etc. All of this represents my Kev-in-Progress.

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Shareables

My first DJ mix.

My friend wrote an article comparing Drake to Call of Duty, tracing their cultural presence in the past 20 years.

My three favorite books this year: Dark Money a startling history of how far right thought has penetrated US politics; James a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the black man Jim, by Percival Everett; The Buried Giant a fantastical tale about memory and love.

A dish I want to cook: chickpea curry.

I'm getting into solo, tabletop role-playing (for boomers and non-nerds: Dungeons & Dragons).

A list of my favorite movies that I saw this year, though I will highlight Dreamgirls, The Substance, A Different Man, Sing Sing, and Dune Part Two.