Mercury in Taurus: Building a Second Brain
Lately, I’ve been reading the book Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte. A second brain is made up of all the apps you use to store information so your physical brain doesn’t have to. Your calendar, your email inbox, your reminders app, your todo list app, all of these are part of your second brain.
Mercury will be going retrograde in Taurus soon, and I’ve been thinking that the timing of my discovery of Building a Second Brain is very apt. Taurus is the sign of embodiment. Mercury in Taurus is embodied thought, and second brains are made of embodied thoughts.
You’ve probably been keeping a second brain for years, even if you haven’t called it that. We are inundated with information all the time, and our brains aren’t evolved to handle it, so we use apps as tools to extend the capabilities of our memories. Building a Second Brain is about learning to use these tools in an intentional and organized way.
In essence, Tiago’s technique is simple: Capture every bit of information that catches your eye. Like early modern gentlemen hoarding beautiful ideas in the chaos of commonplace books, he suggests saving all the information we find important in apps, allowing the chaos to inspire our creativity.
We naturally muse on things that interest us while doing other things. If we capture the insights we form from those musings in our second brain, we will find much of the thinking and research work already done for us by the time we’re ready to act on it.
His solution to information overload may be high tech–the influence of Uranus in Taurus, maybe–but the technique is still embodied, taurean. When thoughts are recorded, they no longer ricochet off each other ephemerally until they vanish. They are given fixed form, a purpose, and something to do.
Mercury in Taurus: Thinking Slow
Taurus is an uncomfortable place for Mercury in the modern world because it is forced to slow down. When Mercury is in the sign of the bull, it ruminates on information like a cow chewing cud.
Mercury’s retrograde in Taurus makes Mercury extra slow, so slow it seems backward. But Mercury in Taurus isn’t “slow” in the sense of “stupid.” It’s slow in the way slow food is slow. Creative. Made from scratch. Wholesome. Allowed all the time it needs for flavors to develop. Caramelized onions rather than the raw ones that make you cry.
Tiago points out that most of the information we consume is created quickly and just as quickly forgotten. It’s as if we spend our days eating nothing but raw onions.
I’ve noticed that when I am on a “raw onion” information diet, I am emotionally overwhelmed and intellectually depressed at the end of the day. My head is full of information, but none of it intrigues me. None of the thoughts filling my head lead anywhere. I have dreams about living in an airport waiting for a plane that never arrives. I wonder if Samuel Beckett spent too much time reading the newspaper when he was writing Waiting for Godot.
The Benefits of Slowing Down
I have naturally found myself slowing down while Mercury is in Taurus. I am two months postpartum, and I have a lot of quiet time while I’m feeding a drowsy infant. At least one of my hands is always occupied, so I can’t do much but watch TV or scroll through my phone.
More often than not, lately, I feel like I’ve already gotten sick of raw content, and I’m hungry for longer reads that require time to digest. I am reading more books. Since discovering Building a Second Brain, I’ve been reading more with projects in mind, adding a few onions to the pot at every feeding time.
The more I move to a slow-information diet, the more often I find myself just looking out the window instead of looking at a screen. My thoughts are interesting to me. They’re going somewhere. I don’t need to be entertained.
Then, later, when my hands are free, I pick up a pen.
