How to Create a Catch

or

How to Organize Your Thoughts with a Weird File

WARNING: W.I.P. NOT DONE YET!!!

"I sometimes find, and I am sure you know the feeling, that I simply have too many thoughts and memories crammed into my mind." "At these times, I use the Pensieve. One simply siphons the excess thoughts from one's mind, pours them into the basin, and examins them at one's leisure. It becomes easier to spot patterns and links, you understand, when they are in this form."

I came up with a way to make what I call a "catch", a device for catching thoughts. I decided on the word "catch" after thinking about Paul Twitchell's saying, "Spirituality is Caught, not Sought."

I noticed that I had a lot of thoughts, but that they were not being connected with each other, and they weren't useless to myself or others.

Just think: Every day, hoards of thoughts pass through your mind, on a variety of subjects. Some you will share with some friends, others you will share with other friends. Some you will wrangle over, and integrate into your world view. Some will become the subjects of papers, and even books. Some are artful fantasies, some are technical details, some are memories, some are mental notes. There is a constant chattering of information.

We make a lot of good observations, but they get lost amongst the bad ones, and eventually, are forgotten.

All these thoughts are present, and swirling about.

I've successfully worked out a way to use a computer to make it easier to organize thoughts and retrieve pieces of information from your life.

Here are some practical uses:

• You find yourself explaining something over and over again, but you forget bits and pieces. You'd like a way to remember all of the pieces, all together.
• You find yourself thinking the same thoughts over and over again.
• You want to tell someone about something that you saw, but forgot relevant details. You'd like to fish it out of your mind, but it's just not comming to you.
• You'd like to write a book or article,
• You find yourself with a fragmented view of the world. You think one way on one morning, and think another way on the next. You'd like to sort it out, but can't quite figure out how.