📅 Journey Notes – Week 12
There is a phrase by Stephen King (quoting Hemingway) that I have been carrying with me for days: “Don’t worry. You’ve always written before and you’ll write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
This past week has been a collision of worlds. On one hand, the chaos of daily life, that productivity debt that sometimes takes my breath away; on the other, total immersion in my experience at the PKM Summit 2026 in Utrecht, among people who came from every corner of the planet to discuss something that, I finally understood, has nothing to do with organizing files.
Here is what I am taking home from these days of intense reflection.
1. Time is not a clock, it is a rhythm
I delved deeper into Misalignment from natural rhythms and quality of life by reading Scott Young and Heschel in The Sabbath. We made an unforgivable mistake when we stopped looking at the moon and the seasons to start looking at the hands of a clock. Before The clock as an instrument of denaturing time, time was elastic, tied to light, to cycles. Today we live in a mechanical Quantum Time that crushes us, a process accelerated by the Industrial Revolution (~1750-1900).
Byung-Chul Han explains it perfectly: modern depression stems from the dogma of “everything is possible.” Society pushes us to “become whatever we want,” but ancient wisdom whispered “become who you are” (Γένοιο οἷος εἷ - Génoio hoîos eî). True freedom is not running faster, but returning to those seasonal rhythms where there is room for intense production, but also for recovery, silence, and the Example of Poiesis — creating with one’s hands, be it ceramics or wood.
2. AI is my Amanuensis, not my replacement
In Utrecht, I listened to Jorge Arango and changed my perspective. For too long we have talked about a “Second Brain,” a term that suggests the idea of delegating thought. I much prefer the idea of the Knowledge Garden.
In this garden, AI is not the gardener, but the Amanuensis. It is the figure that performs the laborious work of transcription, synthesis, and sorting of the extrinsic cognitive load. I use AI to remove the “noise,” to clear the space where sense-making must happen. Because knowledge is not an accumulation of information, but the ability to create meaning, often starting from our tacit-knowledge.
3. PKM as an act of love and legacy
This was the strongest realization. I understood that my need to note, connect, and reflect is a response to the fleeting nature of life.
Since my mother is no longer here, my archive has transformed. It is no longer a database of “learned things.” It is a treasure I am building for Alexander and Maxime. I write so that one day, when I am gone, they can still “talk” to me. So they can know what their father thought of a sunset, a discussion, or a book by Tolstoy.
I do PKM to stop time. To leave traces of who I have been, who I am, and what I hope to become.
In conclusion: wisdom is received and shared
As also emerges in Hesse, beauty and wisdom are driving forces. Wisdom is not ours: we receive it, transform it, and share it.
I return home with the desire to cultivate my digital garden not for myself, but to make it bloom for others. Less “toxic productivity,” more “mindful attention.” Because in the end, we are always on the event horizon between who we believe we are and who we are not yet.