While organizing my things, I found many beautiful notebooks.  Each one had only a few pages written.

Every notebook once carried a clear theme: they were meant to be structured study notes, carefully categorized, designed to make learning more efficient.

But inside, the notes were scattered.  Drafts tucked between pages, ideas left unfinished, concepts never fully organized. Many of the knowledge points are now obsolete. Some are no longer useful at all.

Back then, I was obsessed with structure with having a beginning, a system, an origin. I believed that learning had to be linear, complete, and properly organized.

But over time, I realized that the origin isn’t that important.

We don’t actually move along a single path.  We live inside a vast network.  Every node can lead to a different direction: branching, looping, drifting, reconnecting.

As we move, the original starting point quietly disappears.

What we really do is not “progress toward a neat ending,”  but continuously filter paths through complexity.

Sometimes we circle back to a road we once wanted to take,  only to discover that it has become thicker, richer, more layered.  Not because the road changed but because we did.

Getting lost was never a detour.  It was how understanding grew roots in multiple directions.



—— XC Scribbles · 玖拾陸 XCVI 📒