Remember the campaign in the 80s? “This is your brain on drugs.” For some reason, that’s where my mind went when I first saw this graphic.

I recently had to make a rather drastic move when Evernote tried to increase my annual fee beyond what I was willing to pay. With eleven years of notes, totaling in the thousands, it was time to move out. Luckily, I could shift my schedule around and make the time.

It turned into an explore and discovery mission: what had I been thinking about for all of those years? What interested me? What did I consider important enough to squirrel away, in the hope that I could forever hold the ideas and images these notes contained?

As the project progressed, I started to wonder if what I was finding explained at least some of my general overwhelm with myself. It seems I’m way too interested in way too much! Curiosity doesn’t quite cover it and, even if I store these things, at what point would I ever be able to go back to them?!

Even if I could see the insanity of my hoard as I managed to cull it down to just over 1,000 notes, I still had to find a new home for what remained. And, if I ever hoped to find a stored note when I need it most, the tool had to offer a useful search and discover function.

I’m offering the link to Obsidian’s website, but nothing more. I don’t want to write a software review—there’s already plenty of them out there. My only advice: do your due diligence. Read reviews from multiple sources, watch YouTube videos, and ask yourself what you really need and want.

After researching alternatives, Obsidian was the one for me. It’s not quite as easy to learn, but the tool itself is pretty extraordinary. Here’s the part that blew my mind and prompted me to write this post:

Each point in that graphic is a tag. In plain English: a topic or idea that I tagged onto a note to make it easier to search and find. The tags are interconnected—a note can contain multiple ideas or topics—and they also share folders, which are collections of topics and ideas in bigger bunches.

The first time I clicked on the ‘Graph’ icon in Obsidian, it wouldn’t be over-dramatic to say I was astounded. There was my mind, full of countless interests and curiosities, blooming before me in all their complexity. (You can use the controls to fast-forward. The bloom takes a while!)

This just might be an iconic image depicting one small slice of a mind that’s lived a few decades in an information-overload culture. Is it any wonder we start to forget things? How much can one mind process?

It’s a question I’ve been asking lately. With so much of my life already lived, and the hope that there’s still more to come, I may have stumbled across one way to narrow down the field and find a bit of focus.

Each of those tiny points is something I’ve read about and pondered over the last eleven years, and stored because I thought it was worth saving. Some points look more significant than others.

Do I choose one or many to pursue further? Is there a limit, or is there a way to combine them somehow, to link them like the graph and make them bloom in new and unique ways?

If you’ve read this far and you’re anything like me—perpetually curious and mentally overwhelmed—you’ve likely hoarded information too. Obsidian may be worth a try.

At this age, I have a lot of friends who are also trying to sort through what they’ve hoarded, to downsize, simplify, or minimize. Much of it is material, though some could be digital. Many of us are generally overwhelmed by it all.

Watching that ‘bloom’ gave me new insight in that regard. What if, instead of being intent on clearing it all out, we take a step back and appreciate all that we’ve learned, experienced, and accumulated along the way.

True, we have some cleaning up to do, but there’s also untold stories to discover and share … and wisdom quietly brewing.