Copying and Pasting from my thoughts initially posted in Knowledge management on Discord.
In response to @nickmilo 's question:
I keep asking for the community to think of good metaphors that cover the three parts: (1) curating the relevant notes into one place, (2) working on them: rearranging/merging/deleting/adding/etc (my favorite part), and finally (3) having that map act as a summation of thought (which should continue to evolve into the future)
A Metaphor: Notes as a Train…
They’re like a train. People all get on the train at some point. At stop one the first passengers (ideas) get on board. More get added at each stop. Some get off. All the passengers are on the train at some point. Sometimes passengers have a reserved seat. Sometimes there is only two people on the entire train. Sometimes it’s packed and people have to sit on the floor. Even if you have a reserved seat you aren’t obligated to sit in that seat. You can sit somewhere else. You can give up your seat to someone else. You can move between carriages. You can get off three stops earlier than you intended, or if you’re sneaky, you can hide in the bathroom and stay on three stops longer. The train has a destination, but it also has many destinations. The train never has a final destination because when it reaches the end, it will likely wait for more passengers and then head back the way it came. With new passengers. Or perhaps old passengers, returning from their day trip. Or maybe the train is designated an entirely new route. Maybe it’s picked up off the tracks and dropped and plonked onto a new route. Maybe it’s getting old and is taken out of commission so it goes into the train museum. When the train is on the route, the tracks can always change. It may be stalled and have to sit stagnant and waiting for go ahead.
The passengers have to sit and busy themselves with the idle time. Maybe someone hits the wrong lever and the tracks change and instead of ending up at Brighton, then end up in Grand Central Station. There are all sorts of trains. There are steam trains, and their are high-speed trains, there are double-Decker trains, there is the orient express and there is the train that runs only once a week between two small villages. There is the train that goes underground and crosses an ocean. Every passenger whilst on the train is heading somewhere, but wherever they end up also isn’t their final destination. They may get off at stop three, but they don’t sit at stop three’s train station all day. They go elsewhere. You can speak to your neighbour or you can put in your headphones. You can observe the family sitting a few seats down from you. You can stare out of the window. A train has a map that it follows, but there are many many maps. But all train tracks will in some way or other be connected with all other tracks. Just as all roads lead to Rome, and all rivers lead to the ocean. A train can be a single carriage, or it can be one hundred long. A train can be de-couple or coupled up or quadrupled up. People can jump on board without a ticket. There are conductors that check the tickets and make sure everyone is actually supposed to be there. But they can also make exceptions if they’re feeling particularly kindly.
There was also something about it being a playground, or a painters easel or a whiteboard, but I’m not sure. (You have an easel or a white board, and you can have lists, but you can also wipe them out at will). All your tools are sitting in the little tray attached to the board or easel, but you can always swap out the tools that you use.
I think a map can be a little too definitive. Sometimes a map lasts a thousand years, and yes, maps have to be updated to stay relevant, but I feel the initial idea of a map tends to be a little more fixed. Unless you mean a map as in say, Google Maps, where the map is everywhere, the terrain, the atlas, if you will, and the route that you punch in is the your notes and ideas, and sometimes you have regular routes, like to work, or the supermarket. But sometimes you go to a new shop, or you change job, and you have to put a new route into the map. Map for me conjures up a pirate’s map, a map to x marks the spot, and whilst it could be said that you don’t have to follow a map to a T, you usually are quite passive when following a map. You’re looking at it expecting it to take you to the X, but you usually know what the X is, because that’s why you picked up the map in the first place (or that’s why you started to draw your own map to get there).
Also I’d add that, to bolster the thinking factor, people get inspired when they’re on a train. They’re planning what they’re going to do when they get to their destination. Or they get inspired to start planning another trip entirely. Or they’re just busy thinking about that stupid conference call they have to get on later, or that they forgot to pick up this ingredients for lasagna. But all these people have their own webs, their own lives, even whilst they all sit in the same carriage. There is the world beneath, and then there is the carriage itself, the train itself. The MOC is the train. The notes are the passengers. Or something like that.
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