Hello wonderful people!
I did it! I made a post on a Saturday!
In the midst of a wild week spent trying to prepare for classes to start this coming Tuesday, I had a strangely profound experience which I wanted to share with you all.
Part of my current job involves trying to figure out how to work with an edge case in a piece of math that lets me predict the viscosity of different liquid chemicals, and the method I was using was being… um, problematic. So, I jotted down a note on some printer paper with the day's date and some reminders of the issues I was having, just so that I wouldn’t forget them. Then I dug through two folders of research and company records in an effort to understand more about how the method I was using worked.
As I was looking through all that documentation, it struck me just how human so much of the writing was. There were all sorts of notes scribbled down in the margins of the printed papers: pieces of half-formed ideas, hand-drawn diagrams, little corrections here and there. It felt so familiar and so distant, like nostalgia on someone else’s behalf.
Then, mixed in amongst the documentation, I found it— a piece of faded printer paper that had once looked just like the one I had written my own notes down on. It had a few lines of handwritten notes on it: a date (February of 1984), and some reminders about problems that a previous lab worker had been having with a method to predict liquid viscosity. It was just like the note I had just written.
The feeling of familiarity reached its crescendo here, and I felt like I was peering back in time, sharing a snapshot of history with a faceless, nameless undergraduate employee who had long since moved on with his life, but who had, at least for a brief moment, lived through an experience just like mine.
It was a strangely surreal experience. I read a lot of stories and I do a little bit of family history research, but I’ve never connected quite so strongly with someone I’ve never met as I have with this faceless employee whose name I will never know. Perhaps this is a good reminder that I need to be a bit more invested in the family history work that I have been doing if I want to have these kinds of experiences more often, haha.
I am a prolific record keeper. Journaling is a huge part of my heart and soul, and I have filled upwards of fifteen generic brand dollar composition notebooks (great value notebooks are my favorite addiction haha) with all of the thoughts and stories and experiences that I’ve accumulated since I committed to journaling regularly four years ago now. It warms my heart to think that if something as simple as a seven-line jotted note about problems with a liquid viscosity prediction method can spark such a strong emotional reaction in my own heart, that maybe one day, my journals can provide that connection to children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren who are trying to find their in the world and who need to know that they are not alone in their struggles.
I hope that my writing, both on this website and in my journals, can be that bridge through time and space for people who need to know that they're not alone in their experiences, whether those experiences are good or bad. I know that words and experiences can be such a blessing to the people around me, and I’m grateful that I have the chance to share mine with you all in this small and simple way.
Go have a great week! And don’t forget to write about something that happened, whether it's writing to someone else or just writing a little letter to yourself. Who knows who might need to read it in twenty years? Words travel farther than you think, and perhaps one day, it will be you who needs to look back on what you were experiencing right now and to remember who you used to be.
As always, thanks for taking the time to read. I’ll talk to you again on Saturday.
