frozen octopus

One thing I love lately is generating a word cloud in Obsidian from my morning writing sessions. There is a plugin for it called "Tag & Word Cloud" that generates a word cloud of my most commonly used words.

I run the plugin as a treat for getting a morning writing session done. For example, my list today is "show, tasks, things, let, words, need, time".

It's kind of like having a personal oracle.

I am four months into the daily writing exercise. It started out as 750 words a day. That quickly changed to 200 words a day. I am noticing brain changes for sure. It is easier to write in general. Thoughts and words are coming out quicker for sure. 

The free writing morphed into a sort of morning brain dump session. Each morning the mental bucket gets emptied and there is space to let the ideas drip into for the day. Tasks, thoughts, and other ephemera are in a spot so there is less "trying to remember stuff" being wasted. That energy can be used in other places.

I think two months into it, it went from a scheduled event into a daily habit. If there is no text file for the day in the folder, I get a little annoyed. Missing a day is totally ok because my "next note" is to keep writing [^1]. I also think it took my brain a couple months to trust that this free space was a real thing. At about month three, I started doing things like signing up for a class and planning a podcast. Don't know if there is any connection or if it is just coincidence.

Start writing for no reason [^2].

[^1]: “If you hit a wrong note, it’s the next note that you play that determines if it’s good or bad.” — Miles Davis

[^2]: The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, the second best time is now. (Chinese proverb)