How to take notes

Notes taken while an astrologer is talking are worth having only when there is almost nothing on them. The fullest page in the drawer is reliably the one that turns out to say least. Here is such a page. Three sides of a notepad, both margins used, the handwriting getting worse towards the end. Whoever wrote it was concentrating hard enough to remember the ache in the wrist afterwards. It is 11 months old now. Read it back and it says nothing.

Here is what is on it. Planet names, two of them spelled wrong. A pair of dates with no note of what they attach to. A long sentence about the ninth house, copied down nearly right, which the writer could not now explain to another person. The word money, underlined twice. An arrow joining two parts of the page that no longer look joined. Near the bottom, in smaller writing, ask about mother, with nothing after it.

Here is what is not on it. The sentence that made the writer's chest go tight, about forty minutes in. That sentence is nowhere on the page, and it is the only thing from the hour that has done any work since.

This is the ordinary result of trying to write a reading down, and the reason is not carelessness. Nobody writes as fast as anybody talks. From the first minute you are in a race you lose, and losing it is not the problem. The problem is that the hour goes on running it.

While your hand is copying, you are not judging. You cannot weigh a sentence and spell it at the same time. So the question you should have asked goes past, because asking would have required you to be thinking about the sentence, and you were busy being a machine that stores it. Transcription, which means writing down what is said word for word, is not note-taking. It is a way of being present at your own reading without attending it.

The two jobs

A page in a consulting room is being asked to do two different things, and only one of them belongs in the room.

The first is storage. You are keeping a record for the person you will be in 11 months, who will otherwise remember this hour as four sentences, two of them invented. That job is real, and it has its own essay: the lines written before and after, at your own table, are the subject of keeping a decision journal. What matters now is that storage does not have to happen while the other person is speaking. It can wait an hour. It is better an hour later, when you know which parts mattered.

The second job can only happen in the room. It is thinking. That is what your page is for while you are sitting there, and once you accept it, almost everything on the frantic three sides turns out to be the wrong thing written for the wrong reason.

So the sheet stays nearly empty on purpose. Four kinds of thing go on it.

Claims first, and only the ones that assert something. A claim is a sentence you could disagree with. The period you are in now runs to March 2029 is a claim. Write it, short, with his initials in the margin so that in 11 months you can still tell his sentence from your belief. Most of what gets said in an hour is not a claim. Descriptions, background, the ordinary filling of an hour: none of it needs your pen.

Then the because, which is the half people never write down and the more useful half. When a claim arrives with a reason attached, the reason can be looked up, argued with, or taken to somebody else. A claim on its own can only be believed or not believed. Suppose he says the 2029 boundary comes out of the arithmetic of the daśā (दशा) periods, the method's way of cutting a life into named blocks of years, and that the arithmetic starts from where the moon stood at your birth. Four words of that go on the page, even if you did not follow the reasoning. Four words are enough, later, to find out whether there was any. And when a claim arrives with no reason at all, put a small mark beside it. A page with a column of those marks has told you something about the hour that no single sentence would have.

Dates and numbers next, and these are the ones to get exactly right. Not the year, the month. Not "a fee for the whole thing", but the figure and what it covers. Memory ruins numbers before it ruins anything else, and numbers are what the later arguments are about, both the arguments with other people and the ones you have at two in the morning.

And then the column nobody tells you to keep, which I would give up the other three to protect. Down the right-hand side, in whatever private shorthand suits you: what happened in you. A tick where you felt relief. A dash where you stopped listening. He said this twice. I already knew this. I wanted him to be right. Nobody else in that room can collect any of it. The chart is available to anyone who has your birth details, and the sentences are his and will keep. Your own reaction at twenty to twelve on a Tuesday happens once, and it is gone by the car park, and it is the part that tells you afterwards which bits of the hour you bought and which bits you were sold.

What stays off the page

Three things, while you are still in the chair.

Your own conclusions. If you write so I should wait until after March, you have closed the question in the one place it was meant to stay open, and you have closed it in handwriting you trust. Weeks later you will find that line and read it as advice you were given. It was not. It was you agreeing with somebody in real time, which is very easy to do while a person is being kind to you and watching you write.

Anything about a third person that you would not say to their face. Pages get found. They get read by the people they are about, and your brother's name, your wife's family and a figure you have told nobody are all sitting there in one place. Initials, or nothing.

And the whole of a frightening sentence. Not because writing is dangerous, but because a frightening sentence copied out in full, in the moment, in your own hand, lands on the page looking like a fact about your life rather than something a man said to you at twenty to twelve on a Tuesday. Six words and his initials will find it again. What it means, and what if anything to do about it, is work for a table with nobody selling anything across it.

The physical arrangement matters more than it ought to. One side of one sheet, not a notebook, because a notebook always has a next page and a next page is an invitation. You already have the right sheet, in fact: the page you wrote the night before, described in what to bring, has a back. Use it. Paper rather than the phone, partly because typing is fast enough to let you transcribe, which is the whole trouble, and partly because of what a phone in the hand does to a room. Whether to ask for the hour to be recorded is a separate question with its own answer, and not this one.

Then the part that feels rude and is not. Put the pen down.

Put it down at the moment something lands, which is the moment your hand most wants to move. Look up instead and say the small unimpressive thing that is arriving. I do not follow. Say that again. Why that month and not the one before it. A reading is a conversation, and a person writing steadily is not in the conversation; they are filing it.

Most practitioners slow down for somebody taking notes, and a good many will say write this part down, which is a fair sign, because it means they think there is something here you can carry out of the door. A few change what they say once the pen comes out. I would not build a test on that, since honest people get self-conscious too. Worth noticing, nothing more.

Eleven months later, the page from that hour reads very differently from the three-sided one. Four claims with initials beside them. Two reasons, one of them four words long. A date and a figure. A tick, a small circle, and he said this twice down the side. It takes 11 seconds to read. It is a far worse record than the frantic page, and that is precisely what makes it worth having: it is what was left over from an hour you spent thinking.

And leave the bottom third of the sheet empty. You will want it in the car park, when the sentence you did not write down comes back and asks to be argued with.