Walking through an imperial garden today in Tokyo, as the rain poured on little old me, fiercely gripping an umbrella and clenching my fists to stay warm, a variety of memories streamed through my head.
One memory started in Rome, late one night after dinner…lost in the wrong side of town, struggling to find the right public transit line and hoping the many drunk Italian men wouldn’t approach me in this deserted bus station and ask what I was doing.
As I build my collection of travel experiences I am starting to connect different memories. Sometimes an emotion bonds the memories, or sometimes it’s a physical appearance, or a crazy local who reminds me of a crazy local in a different country.
Seeing the latticework develop, drawing the connections, and discovering why my mind — without consulting me — decided to relate disparate experiences, is an enormously rewarding subconscious exercise. And it struck me, on this wet rainy night in Tokyo, that finding meaning and connection among different memories is not only fun, but an important capability to develop in business and in life.
The best way, of course, to develop the capability is to accumulate and record your experiences. One reason why I like blogging. Because in the blogging world, not only do I record my experiences and ideas and can see how my thought process developed, but I let others participate in that process too.
And is there any more exciting moment than two different takes on the same experience?