Leave Room for the Big Rocks

My digital to-do list forgot something again.

I know how ridiculous that sentence sounds. The whole point of a to-do list is that I am allowed to forget. The list isn’t.

Yet on the last day of October, Halloween, I found myself staring at Microsoft To Do with that familiar suspicion: I am almost certain I put something here. And now it is gone.

Bug? User error? Some weird sync issue?

No idea.

So I did what increasingly feels like the most advanced form of backup technology available to humanity.

I picked up a pen.

On the list that did survive were a few wonderfully incompatible things: have Halloween fun, clean the house, exercise, do some DJing, and prepare for somewhere between 72 hours and two weeks without normal services.

Quite the Saturday.

The preparation part sounds more dramatic than it is. I am not building a bunker. Governments across Europe have been encouraging people to be able to manage for a while if normal systems stop working. Power outage. Extreme weather. Some digital disruption. Whatever.

So I planned a walk to the shops, which conveniently doubled as exercise, and some canned food that doesn’t depend on the freezer staying frozen.

There is something almost funny about preparing for technological failure while my digital to-do list is already failing me.

Maybe that is why the pen suddenly felt reassuring.

The things that survive

Cleaning the room uncovered another kind of backup system.

An old paper agenda from the mid-1990s.

There I was, eighteen years old again, represented not by an algorithmic memory or a cloud photo archive, but by pages full of scraps, pictures, notes and whatever I found interesting enough to stick inside.

One picture caught my attention because for years I had remembered the woman incorrectly. I thought it was Pamela Anderson.

It wasn’t.

It was Karen Mulder.

And suddenly a forgotten image became a little tunnel through thirty years of time.

That is what physical things sometimes do better than digital ones. They don’t notify you. They don’t resurface themselves because an engagement algorithm calculated that this memory will keep you scrolling.

They just wait.

A paper agenda can sit quietly for decades until you open it, and eighteen-year-old you reaches forward.

The music did something similar.

I hadn’t actually started DJing yet, despite putting the controller somewhere easier to grab. But I listened. One track led automatically to another: old house and trance, remixes, songs I hadn’t heard in years.

At some point the algorithm served me something new from something old, which is perhaps one of the nicer things algorithms can do.

Music is a peculiar form of time travel. A synthesizer doesn’t merely remind you of a year. Sometimes it restores a room, a friendship, a version of yourself.

Perhaps that’s why I wrote the tracks down too.

Digital discovery, analog memory.

And yes, while cleaning the house I inevitably made the joke to myself that I should DJ some clean house.

Dad joke achieved. Halloween may proceed.

Leave some empty space

While rearranging my shelves, I deliberately left space around a rock.

An actual rock.

It isn’t enormous, but it is larger than the smaller stones around it, which is enough to remind me of the old big-rock metaphor: if you fill your container with small things first, there may be no room left for what matters most.

I’ve used that image at work. I’ve used it when thinking about strategy. And now, apparently, I need it literally sitting on a shelf.

My first big rock is obvious.

Family.

My wife, my children, my parents, and the handful of friendships I actually want enough time to maintain properly.

The second is work.

That one is more complicated.

I’ve always tended to do well when things change. Change gives me energy. Yet lately I notice it feels harder than it normally does. I don’t know precisely why.

And that’s okay.

I still want to step up professionally. I just don’t want work to expand until it becomes the gravel poured between every other stone.

The third is finances.

Not money as an objective. Breathing room.

Enough control that an unexpected expense doesn’t become an emergency, and enough resilience that if the digital payment system has a bad day, life doesn’t immediately stop with it.

Which brings me back to emergency cash, canned food and everything else that sounded slightly paranoid ten minutes ago.

Preparedness isn’t necessarily fear.

Sometimes it is simply the practical expression of leaving room.

Room for things to go wrong.

Room for people.

Room for improvisation.

Room for the big rocks.

Training data across time

The strangest connection came later from comedian Sarah Cooper and her series called Robot Training Data.

The premise made me laugh because, in a completely different way, it resembles what I have been doing here.

Talking.

Recording.

Leaving fragments.

Giving future machines, or future people, material from which to construct some version of a human being at a particular moment.

She asked for an unhinged but respectable comment. Mine was:

Do you think it’s possible to send your conscious thoughts across a fluid timeline?

A perfectly normal Halloween question.

But looking around the room, maybe we already do something less mystical than that.

The old agenda did it.

Music did it.

Karen Mulder’s photograph did it.

Books do it.

These recordings do it.

A thought leaves one moment, becomes an artifact, and arrives somewhere else later.

Not telepathy. Not time travel.

Transmission.

Perhaps that is why I remain fascinated by simulation theories and AI-generated worlds. I’ve been experimenting with Meta AI, making short synthetic videos from prompts and ideas, trying to make something visible from something that only existed in my head.

Sometimes the result feels oddly dreamlike.

You imagine something, describe it, and a machine returns an approximation of the dream.

Is that simulation?

Probably not in the grand philosophical sense.

But it is another boundary getting thinner.

The border between imagined and rendered.

Between memory and reconstruction.

Between a thought and an artifact.

And perhaps eventually between the timeline where something happened and all the ones where it might have happened differently.

I don’t know.

That’s the whole point.

Curiosity is considerably more interesting than pretending certainty.

For now, I have more practical dimensions to explore.

It is four o’clock. I still need my walk. I have groceries to buy. Halloween awaits. The house is cleaner, although definitely not finished. The DJ controller is ready whenever I am.

And Microsoft To Do may or may not remember any of this tomorrow.

That’s fine.

I wrote it down.

More importantly, I left some space.

For canned food. For music. For uncertainty.

And for the big rocks.