Notes App Anthropology

Observations from an Interior Life

I was out with my son Oliver one afternoon, digging through my bag for the small notebook I rarely leave the house without. He looked at me exasperated.

“Mom, he said, “just put it in your notes app.”

If I’m being honest, I had never considered the idea. I almost always carry some assortment of notebooks–my journal, my planner, and a smaller notebook for lists, observations, and anything else that catches my attention.

I’ve been making lists for as long as I can remember. When I was younger, my mom would find them strewn throughout the house–favorite teachers, best songs, cutest boys, and so on. I wrote them on notebook paper, receipts, napkins–anything within reach.

My affinity for list making has remained over the years, though the subject matter has matured a bit. My lists now include books to read, restaurants to try, Spanish phrases I want to learn, snippets of conversations that catch my attention, questions I cannot answer quickly.

One flip through any of my notebooks reveals the eclectic nature of my interior life. What people choose to write down says something about them.

My friend Katie recently inspired me to do a digital detox. What I found when I opened my Notes app–the place ideas go when I’m caught without a notebook–wasn’t exactly cohesive and organized. It was more accidental anthropology.

Fragments of thought.

Emotional artifacts.

Observed moments.

Quotes from women coffee producers in Honduras sat alongside grocery lists. Philosophical observations next to taco vocabulary. Moments I deemed important enough to save so that I could return to them later:

• Scared and excited go together

• ”I’m starting to get annoyed at my dental assistant because she’s so cheerful” - overhead on the streets

• Culture shock is the growing pains of a new perspective

• Tenderness and care

• ”I wish I’d known you sooner, so I could love you longer” - from my dear friend, Rebecca

• Women in skirts and flip flops carrying coffee trees in crates strapped around the front of their heads. - notes from coffee research

• Radical acceptance–let people be who they are

• “I think of them more as conceptualized pieces of art than a time keeper.” -my son on watches

• How do we make people more kind?

• Change will always be a noun and a verb; it is a thing that happens to us and also a thing we make happen

• ”Your presence is more than capable of containing it. The emotion is not who you are.” - except from A New Earth

• Simply live the day

• “Women with an education go to the farm and see a real disconnect.” -quote from a coffee interview in Rwanda

• “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” - quote from Joan Didion

• “I think as Colombians we have to show people our country and that it’s more than violence. Colombia is beautiful.” -quote from a coffee interview in Colombia

Reading through notes spanning the last five years feels like walking through a museum of my own attention–a record of what moved me, what I wanted to preserve, what I hoped to return to later.

Maybe that’s all list making really is: evidence of attention. Proof that for one brief moment in an ordinary life, something felt important enough to write down.