In Walter Isaacson’s wonderful new biography of Leonardo Da Vinci, he spends a lot of time dissecting and exploring the ideas in Da Vinci’s notebooks. From his military sketches to his lesser known fables to self-portraits and scientific breakthroughs, Da Vinci poured his best self onto these pages (in fact, he often carried them around on a rope attached to his belt so they were always at hand).
As Isaacson observed, Da Vinci’s lifelong habit of journaling should inspire us to do some of our own:
“Five hundred years later, Leonardo’s notebooks are around to astonish and inspire us. Fifty years from now, our own notebooks, if we work up the initiative to start them, will be around to astonish and inspire our grandchildren, unlike our tweets and Facebook posts.”
He is so right. Marcus Aurelius is himself a wonderful example of this. The American philosopher Brand Blanshard was as enthralled with Marcus’s writing as Isaacson was with Da Vinci. As he said:
“Few care now about the marches and countermarches of the Roman commanders. What the centuries have clung to is a notebook of thoughts by a man whose real life was largely unknown who put down in the midnight dimness not the events of the day or the plans of the morrow, but something of far more permanent interest, the ideals and aspirations that a rare spirit lived by.”
The question for you then is when are you going to stop wasting your time tweeting and chattering and texting and start producing your own notebooks? Keep a commonplace book. Keep a diary. Start a journal. Create something that, if the centuries don’t cling to, at least your family can. Or if they don’t care, produce something that will give you something to look back on and learn from.
But start. Stop putting it off. Take the initiative.
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