Capturing a Moment
Tom Petty once professed that he never bothered writing down his song ideas. “There’s always another one,” he’d say.
Nice, Tom! Talk about embracing abundance. I aspire to be more like that – allowing ideas to come and go freely. Ideas really are an abundant resource, and when you stop worrying so much about capturing every single one of them, you free up a lot of your mental faculties to start gravitating towards the best ones.
Good ideas come back over time and stick around. Bad ideas come in a flash and disappear almost as quickly. When I embrace the laws of abundance and allow my mind to do its own sorting, my best ideas seem to start forming themselves much better and faster.
However, there are times when documenting an experience – capturing a moment – can be quite a useful exercise. If you want to share your idea with others, then you probably need to do something to get it out of your head and into the world where it can help and change people.
For the most part, I try to embrace abundance and allow lots of my bad ideas to die a quick and silent death, strangled by my mind’s tight grasp, but when I’m working on something important, capturing the moment I’m in can be a magical experience and wholly useful. Getting ideas out of my head and onto paper or into a recorder let’s my mind wander further by clearing a new path through the forest. Sometimes, when you can see your destination but can’t take the well-worn road, you have to get out the machete, and hack your way there.
Also, documenting a process for others to see is a great educational tool. I’m sure you occasionally read Riskology.co because of the fun stories, but really, you’re here to learn something. In that respect, capturing my daily moments and transcribing them in a way that you can actually get something useful from them is one of the most important things I do every day.
Start letting the unimportant parts of life fade away, but hold on for dear life to the ones that make it worth living.
Here are a few ways I like to capture my own important moments:
- Jot them down in my journal
- Bookmark all the websites I’m looking at
- Sit and form a strong mental image
- Sketch them out on a notepad
- Take a picture of whatever I’m working on
- Dictate them into a recorder
- Create a story and share it with someone else
- Write a poem
- Craft a song
Whatever your favorite method of capturing a moment in time is, I think it’s often more important to focus on the feelings and emotions than the events themselves. Facts have a way of sorting themselves out on their own. What’s really valuable is the experience.
I recently read a fantastic book, The Lost City of Z, about Percy Fawcett, who was one of the last great explorers of The Amazon. When you read his journal entries, the day-to-day observations quickly fade away, but the experiences he records are quire remarkable. Rather than writing about the lack of food, he writes of his extreme hunger. Rather than describing his expedition members exactly, he talks about their shared experiences and how he interprets their behavior. It’s quite fascinating.
So how about you over there? What remarkable moments are you trying to capture?
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Image by Bethan