It’s early and my dog and I are the only ones up so far, since my wife likes to sleep in on the weekends these days. We’ve been out for an early morning walk (with too much barking when a neighbor opened their door) the dog has been fed, the coffee has been made (hazelnut light roast) and the fire is lit and burning on its own.

The sky is white now and getting lighter by the minute, although it was dark enough on our walk for me to still make out Antares and a few of the other stars of the Scorpion through the dawn glow.

I’m still trying to figure out how to make my cobbled together paper and digital personal knowledge house-of-cards into a system that will actually work for me in the long run, and frankly I’m stumped. There are so many options, but also it seems that whenever I start using one, a notification pops up on my constellation of devices and I’m suddenly distracted and lose the thread. This is how these devices are designed of course, and they have to be tended like a garden to prevent that from happening again and again.

Paper gives me the opposite of this, at the cost of connectivity and easy search, or at least the promise of those things. It lacks the easy templating available on a computer. Writing is slower than typing by far, and errors are forever. Editing is difficult if not nonexistent.

The longer I struggle with how to solve this dilemma the more I feel that a true solution is impossible. This unsolvable koan has been burning in my life now for a decade or more, and the only solution that keeps coming up is that the answer is whatever you’re using right now. There is nothing else, nothing more, nothing better, nothing worse, just this note, in this medium, again and again, forever.

Perhaps the endless seeking is the poison and simply ending the search – no matter what the choice – is the cure.