Texting and mailing someone else is a normal way of communication, but what about mailing yourself?  Not quite normal, I suspect.

A few months ago, I dreamed that I spent some time with an online friend (who I have never met in the flesh).  During the time we spent together, he several times wrote something on a small handheld device.  He explained casually that these were messages to himself.  Evidently he also checked the messages from himself regularly – my impression is that he did this at the same time he wrote new ones, several times an hour.

In waking life, I am the one who mails myself.  But I don’t do it often.  Sometimes I send a message from my work account to my private Gmail account to remind myself of something I should do at home, rather than keep thinking of it through the workday.  Which would probably not be enough, since I tend to forget work when I walk out the door. Besides, it would distract me while I was there.  So better to send a mail to my home self.  Occasionally it is the other way around. And today I sent a mail to myself from my smart phone on the bus.  I sent it from the Gmail account to the Chaosnode.net account, which also shows up in my inbox after some minutes.

But I do this a few times a month at most, not a few times an hour. Perhaps I should do it more, though.

In a manner of speaking, some of the entries here are notes to myself. I write a few private ones, and there are some drafts I don’t seem to ever get around to publishing, so I guess those are exclusively notes to myself. But even those I share with others may also be of interest for my future self, if any. At least many of my past entries have been of interest to my later self.

And yet the main reason I switched to WordPress was that reading my past entries started eating up my time.  There was like 10 past entries for each day, and I had gotten into the habit of reading them all. At this point, reading my past entries took more time than writing a new one. Sometimes much of the evening. Now I only rarely see them at all. That may be a bit little again.

And there is even a religious dimension to this. In Christianity (and presumably Judaism) there is an exhortation in the Psalms to not forget God’s acts of kindness toward us.  That is easy to forget in our personal life.  For instance, when I have some kind of sickness or pain or disturbance of the body, I think about it; but once that disappears, I forget that it was ever there, unless I have written it down, and unless it was a huge disturbance in my life.

For instance, today I have some tenderness and pain in the skin on my right foot. (There is no visible swelling or discoloration though.) While talking to God, I mentioned this but added that there was no need to do anything spectacular, if it was as harmless as it seemed.  “But if it were to go away, I’d be grateful… wait, no. I probably wouldn’t.  I would probably forget the whole thing, unless there is some way for me to remind my future self of it.”