I've been flipping through my old notebooks lately. The ones with coffee stains on page 47 and that grocery list from 2019 bleeding through from the back cover. There's something oddly geological about them.
My thoughts accumulate in these pages the same way sediment settles at the bottom of ancient seas. Layer upon layer. Some compressed and dark with the weight of difficult years. Others light and chalky, barely there at all.
The mountains here in the Salzkammergut hold millions of years in their stone. My notebooks hold maybe fifteen if I'm being generous. But the principle is the same, isn't it? Time made visible. Memory made solid.
The Stratigraphy of a Life
Geologists can read rock layers like chapters in a book. They call it stratigraphy. The Dachstein limestone tells stories of tropical seas that covered this region 200 million years ago. The Hallstatt formation speaks of even older times, when these mountains were just sediment on an ocean floor.
My notebook from 2017 tells a different kind of story.
The handwriting changes halfway through. Before June, the letters are tight and controlled, leaning slightly right. After June, they sprawl across the page, sometimes barely legible. I don't need to read the entries to know what happened that summer. The sediment layer itself tells the story. A breakup, if you're curious. The kind that makes you question everything you thought you knew about yourself.
The Gosau formation in these mountains contains a thin layer of iridium. It marks the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary—the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. You can touch that layer with your bare hands if you know where to look. One centimeter of rock that separates the age of reptiles from the age of mammals.
My notebooks have their own extinction events. Smaller, more personal, but no less significant to the life that came after.
What Gets Preserved, What Gets Lost
Not everything becomes a fossil. Most organisms that ever lived left no trace. They decomposed, scattered, returned to the cycle. Only under specific conditions—rapid burial, lack of oxygen, the right chemical environment—does soft tissue turn to stone.
The same selective preservation happens in my notebooks.
I write down the arguments but rarely the quiet evenings. The anxiety before a presentation gets three pages. The presentation going well gets a checkmark. My notebooks over-represent crisis and under-represent contentment, which makes them terrible historical records but probably pretty normal as human documents go.
The mountains preserve what was durable. Shells and bones and teeth. The creatures without hard parts vanished almost entirely from the fossil record. We know they existed—we can see their burrows, their tracks, the spaces they left behind—but we can't know what they really looked like.
What are the soft parts of my life that won't survive in these pages? The texture of morning light in my kitchen. The specific quality of my mother's laugh. The way my cat sits on the windowsill every afternoon at 3 PM, waiting for the sun to hit that exact spot. These things happen daily but rarely make it to paper. They're too ordinary, too consistent, too much like breathing to seem worth recording.
Until they're gone.
The Bias of the Record
Paleontologists talk about preservation bias. Marine organisms fossilize more readily than terrestrial ones because ocean environments offer better conditions for preservation. So our understanding of ancient life skews heavily toward creatures that lived in water.
My notebooks skew toward evenings and weekends. There's almost nothing from my workdays. Not because nothing happens at work, but because I don't carry my notebook to the office. The record suggests I live a life of contemplative solitude punctuated by occasional social events. The reality includes forty hours a week of emails and meetings and small talk by the coffee machine.
What would a complete record look like? Probably unbearable. Probably boring. The mountains don't preserve every grain of sand that ever existed. They preserve the layers that tell a story.
Maybe that's what I'm doing too. Curating. Selecting. Deciding which sediment matters.
Reading the Layers Backward
When I open a notebook from 2015, I'm doing what geologists do with core samples. Reading time in reverse. The present at the top, the past at the bottom.
But here's where the metaphor breaks down a bit.
Rock layers stay put. They might fold or fault or erode, but they don't rewrite themselves. My notebooks aren't so stable. I add margin notes years later. I cross things out. I insert pages with tape. Sometimes I rip pages out entirely, though I can usually see the torn edge, a gap in the record.
The Dachstein limestone doesn't wake up one day and decide it's embarrassed about its Triassic period. It doesn't edit its fossils or wish it had been different sediment. It just is what it is, layer after layer, holding its history without judgment.
I can't say the same for my notebooks.
There's a whole section in my 2018 notebook where I've blacked out names with permanent marker. Not because anything terrible happened, but because those friendships ended and it felt weird to keep reading those names in my own handwriting. The conversations still exist underneath the ink. The sediment is still there. I've just made it harder to read.
Is that dishonest? Or is it just another layer—the layer of revision, of reinterpretation, of the present self trying to make peace with the past self?
Compression and Metamorphosis
The deeper you go in the earth, the more pressure builds. Sedimentary rock can transform into metamorphic rock under enough heat and compression. Limestone becomes marble. Shale becomes slate. The original structure remains visible, but changed. Harder. Denser. Different.
Do thoughts metamorphose too?
I think they do. I wrote something in 2016 about feeling stuck in my career, about wanting to quit and move to the coast and start over. At the time, it felt like a crisis. Reading it now, I can see it was actually the beginning of something good. The pressure of that dissatisfaction eventually pushed me to make changes—not dramatic ones, but real ones. I didn't move to the coast. I took a different position. Started saying no to things that drained me. The crisis transformed into growth.
The words on the page haven't changed. But their meaning has metamorphosed under the pressure of time and distance and everything that came after.
The Weight of Accumulation
I have seventeen notebooks on my shelf right now. They take up about forty centimeters of space. Not much, considering they represent nearly two decades of thinking.
The sedimentary layers that form the Dachstein massif are over 1,000 meters thick. They represent about 50 million years of accumulation. That's 0.02 millimeters per year, give or take. Unimaginably slow.
My notebooks accumulate faster—about two centimeters per year if I average it out. But they feel just as slow while I'm living them. One page at a time. One day at a time. You don't notice the layer forming while you're in it.
The weight of my notebooks is negligible. I can carry all seventeen in a backpack if I want to. The weight of the thoughts inside them is something else entirely. Some pages feel heavier than others. Some I can't read without my chest tightening.
The mountains carry their weight differently. They push down into the earth's crust, creating roots that extend kilometers below the surface. The higher the mountain, the deeper the root. It's called isostasy. The visible peak is balanced by invisible depth.
Maybe that's true for notebooks too. The thin pages on my shelf are balanced by something deeper, something I can't see or measure. The weight of experience. The root system of memory.
Erosion and Forgetting
Mountains don't last forever. Wind and water wear them down. Ice wedges into cracks and splits rock apart. The Alps are eroding at a rate of about 1 millimeter per year—roughly the same speed they're still rising from tectonic forces. They're in a kind of dynamic equilibrium, being built and destroyed simultaneously.
My notebooks are eroding too, just more literally. The paper yellows. The ink fades. The binding cracks. Give them another fifty years and they'll be fragile. Another hundred and they might be illegible.
But the real erosion happens in my mind.
I can't remember writing most of what's in these notebooks. The act of writing is gone, weathered away by time. I recognize my handwriting, but I don't remember forming those letters. I read entries about events I've completely forgotten. Conversations with people whose faces I can barely picture. Worries that seemed enormous at the time but left no trace in my current memory.
The notebook remembers what I've forgotten. It's a strange feeling, reading your own thoughts as if they belong to someone else. Which, in a way, they do. The person who wrote those words doesn't exist anymore. They've been eroded away, replaced by this current version of me, who shares some characteristics but isn't quite the same.
The mountains work the same way. The Dachstein today isn't the same mountain it was a million years ago. The surface has been stripped away. The peak is lower. The valleys are deeper. But it's still the Dachstein. Continuous through change.
What Survives
Not everything erodes at the same rate. Harder rock resists weathering longer. Quartz persists when feldspar crumbles. Some minerals are nearly indestructible. Zircon crystals can survive for billions of years, outlasting the rocks they formed in, getting recycled into new formations again and again.
Some thoughts are like that. Persistent. Resistant to erosion.
I've been writing variations of the same idea for fifteen years. It shows up in different notebooks, in different contexts, phrased different ways, but it's fundamentally the same thought: the tension between wanting to belong and wanting to be free. Between roots and wings. Between staying and going.
I didn't realize I'd been circling this idea for so long until I read through all the notebooks in sequence. It's my personal zircon crystal, apparently. The thought that survives everything else, that gets recycled into new contexts, that persists no matter how much the surface changes.
The mountains have their persistent features too. The basic structure of the Alps has been here for 30 million years. The details change—glaciers advance and retreat, valleys deepen, peaks crumble—but the fundamental architecture remains. You can still trace the original folds and faults that formed when Africa collided with Europe.
Maybe that's what we're all doing with our notebooks and our journals and our attempts to record ourselves. We're trying to identify the persistent structures. The thoughts that survive erosion. The core of who we are beneath all the surface changes.
The Comfort of Permanence
Why do I keep these notebooks? I rarely read them. They take up space. They're mildly embarrassing. They won't survive me by more than a generation or two at best.
But they exist. They're solid. They're proof that all those days happened, that all those thoughts were real, that I was here, thinking and feeling and trying to make sense of things.
The mountains offer the same comfort, just on a different scale. They were here before me. They'll be here after me. They're proof that something can last, that not everything is temporary, that permanence—or something close enough to it—is possible.
Standing in front of the Dachstein, I'm looking at rock that formed when dinosaurs walked the earth. When I write in my notebook, I'm adding my own thin layer to a much shorter timeline. But the impulse is similar. The desire to leave a mark. To say "this happened" and have something solid to point to.
We're all making our own sedimentary records. Some people use photographs. Some use social media. Some use children or buildings or businesses or art. We're all trying to turn experience into something that will outlast the experience itself.
The mountains don't try. They just accumulate. Layer after layer, year after year, without intention or anxiety or self-consciousness. They don't worry about whether their sediment is interesting enough or meaningful enough or worth preserving.
Maybe that's the lesson. Not to stop keeping notebooks, but to stop worrying so much about what they mean. To just let the layers accumulate. To trust that the pattern will emerge eventually, that the persistent thoughts will survive, that the record will be what it needs to be.
The mountains have been here for millions of years. My notebooks might last a hundred. But both are doing the same work: holding time, making memory visible, turning the invisible flow of experience into something you can touch.
What the Layers Tell Us
Here's what I've learned from comparing my notebooks to sediment layers: both are incomplete records that tell true stories.
Both preserve some things and lose others. Both are shaped by the conditions of their formation. Both accumulate slowly, almost imperceptibly, until suddenly you look back and see how much has built up. Both contain gaps and discontinuities. Both require interpretation.
And both are more valuable for what they reveal about process than for what they preserve about specific moments.
The real story in my notebooks isn't the individual entries. It's the pattern of accumulation. The way certain themes recur. The way my handwriting changes. The way my concerns shift over time. The slow metamorphosis of a person trying to figure out how to live.
The real story in the mountains isn't the individual fossils or the specific composition of any single layer. It's the evidence of deep time. The proof that slow processes can build something immense. The demonstration that change happens whether you notice it or not.
My seventeen notebooks are my personal geology. They're how I know I've been here, how I track my own slow uplift and erosion, how I measure time in something other than calendar pages.
The mountains will outlast my notebooks by millions of years. But right now, on this particular Tuesday in this particular year, both are doing their job. Both are holding history. Both are making the invisible visible.
And maybe that's enough. To be a thin layer in the great accumulation of time. To add your sediment to the pile. To know that something of what you thought and felt will persist, at least for a while, pressed between the layers of everything that came before and everything that will come after.
The mountains don't need my notebooks to exist. But I need both. The mountains to remind me that some things last. The notebooks to help me accept that most things don't. Together, they make time bearable. They make change visible. They turn the flow of days into something I can hold in my hands and say: this happened. I was here. This is what it felt like.
And then I close the notebook and look up at the mountains, and I feel the strange comfort of being both temporary and part of something permanent. A thin layer