--- a prequel to: [[My Cathedral System - Organise your second brain]] and building on [[The Cathedral System - my virtual Eudaimonia Machine]] also using [[Living Cathedrals from Digital Gardens]] # Cathedral Thinking, Digital Gardening & Second Brain: Foundations for Living Systems This piece is a prologue—a foundational story for those curious about how I’ve developed my personal system. Whether you’re arriving here before or after reading my article on _My Cathedral System_, what follows are the grounding ideas that shaped its architecture. Great prequels deepen the context and expand the world for what comes next. My own journey—of discovery, experimentation, and adaptation—has been far more meandering than the structured frameworks below might suggest. But these three concepts form the bedrock: the foundational ideas that have guided how I think, build, and live. ## The Search for Digital Wisdom If you are traversing these pages - you might just be a like minded nomad seeking inspiration and instruction on ways to build the personal routines and practices, both physical and digital, that support the mission of life-long learning, personal development and living a good life. I've iterated on a more popular term 'Eudaimonia' (human flourishing) to something more personally transformative: "Euformia - "The practice of forming the good life." But these following concepts don't need to reshape your own philosophies or provide a complete doctrine - take inspiration as you need, enhance your toolkits and adapt for your own. The search for digital wisdom is different for everyone, but I suspect there will be common themes and repeating advice that emerges on your travels: - The challenge of information overwhelm and digital fragmentation - The quest for systems that honor both efficiency and reverence for knowledge - Need to form approaches that are adaptable and flexible in a complex and fast-paced world ## Cathedral Thinking: Building for Transformation The first of my three core concepts is more about mindset than practical system - but I like a metaphor - and I have found that having a vision in the literal sense, has helped shape my design. Cathedral Thinking is all about long-term thinking, about creating something of such purpose and quality that the benefits outlive you. It's about legacy, giving back by applying your craft to an outcome you may not see and entrust the completion of to future generations. The term is drawn directly from the building of these massive, intricate structures that took decades or centuries to build. Sanctuaries of wisdom that employed mastery and dedication to achieve a vision. > _“The work we do today may not be seen to completion in our lifetime. But we do it anyway, because the future is worth building for.”_ > — _Inspired by Rick Antonson, author of_ _Cathedral Thinking_ I'm not suggesting you need to turn to religion or become a master mason - but understand that transformative change and growth is a life-long endeavour that can have a home you build and put your personal stamp on. I have drawn from the metaphor of the Cathedral to design the boundaries and organisation of my digital systems, it's enormity to remind me that the work is long, not fleeting and that its completion might one day serve more than my own needs. Of course, it likely achieves more of a 'fortress of solitude' vibe, but it is the practice of legacy building that is just as useful beyond these systems as it is within it. **🧱 Core Principles of Cathedral Thinking** 1. **Intergenerational Vision**: Planning that extends beyond personal reward or lifetime—like planting trees whose shade we will not sit under. 2. **Deliberate Foundation-Building**: Laying deep roots: values, structures, and frameworks that can evolve while retaining coherence over time. 3. **Tolerating Incompletion**: Embracing ambiguity and incompletion as part of a bigger unfolding—working towards purpose, not perfection. 4. **Collaborative Legacy**: Understanding that success is shared, iterative, and cumulative. Others may finish or transform what you start. 5. **Systems Stewardship**: Designing not for trends, but for adaptability and stewardship. Systems that serve people for decades. **In practice:** - The Cathedral becomes a physical blueprint for a digital system. - Different spaces within the cathedral may serve different purposes - learning, practice, reflection etc. - It becomes a place of retreat and introspection - capturing your thoughts and insights. - A place of learning and to store knowledge, to reference and make connections across. - Like the 'Eudaimonia Machine' proposed by David Dewane, it might also contain the 'rooms' and conditions for creation too. Cathedral Thinking has become the architectural principles on which I have developed my personal systems from - a digital manifestation of a physical vision, a mindset, a place to develop and practice, a system of creation and a knowledge repository. In short - it stands for Discovery, Practice and Creation. ## Second Brain: Systems for Thought Management If Cathedral Thinking provides your architectural vision, then the scaffolding you will require to build upwards is the 'Second Brain' concept. The Second Brain is a concept popularised by Tiago Forte, designed to offload and organise your thinking using digital tools so that your real brain can focus on creativity, connection, and clarity. It’s rooted in a simple idea: > _“Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.”_ > — _David Allen, Getting Things Done_ If you are like me, then once you begin to embrace continuous learning and discovery, fuelled by your curiosity, then a flood of ideas and insights begin to overwhelm what you can hold 'in memory.' With a digital Second Brain you can externalise memory and cognition, building a system of notes, ideas, and resources that serve as an extension of your intelligence and awareness. This system doesn't even need to be digital. Likely you are already practicing something like this - in the form of a trusty notepad or book. But advances in technology mean that today we can curate, sync and interrogate these impressions in ever more efficient and interesting ways when we capture them in 1's and 0's. Having inspected a few options like Notion or Create, my system is built with Obsidian. I'll go into the detail in a future article, but Obsidian is in a category of enhanced note-taking tools that offer features beyond the raw text editor that can create a searchable repository of files that can be manipulated with meta-data to perform a number of useful features: **Core Features**: Task lists, daily notes, templating, linking etc. **Advanced Use Cases**: Kanban workflows, dashboards, metadata queries etc. Built on single files in markdown format, these tools are simple and flexible to adapt, get started quickly and can be highly personalised. I have found that all systems need organisational principles to follow in practice. So the rise of digital tools as second brains has also surfaced several approaches to organising notes such as 'Zettlekasten' or the 'PARA method' - each taking a different approach to the categorisation, naming convention and organising of notes so that they might be accessed efficiently. The method that you prefer will depend on what you are trying to achieve with your system. Different approaches have different strengths and weaknesses and I could spin out into a whole article on the pros and cons of all of them - but this is already pretty well covered by others. The approach I have taken is a personal adaptation of 'Pipelines, Pillars and Vaults' - a less popular framework perhaps, but the 'Pipelines' and 'Vaults' elements align well with my Cathedral principles of Discovery and Creation. Vaults as they might sound are knowledge vaults, organised how you like, but storing the built up insight and intelligence you gather as you go, for future referencing. They fit well with the Cathedral visual too - the crypts and basement rooms with scrolls of age old wisdom built up over ages. Pipelines were the more compelling parts of this framework - providing a way to manage 'work in motion' which other approaches did not. If you plan to create, produce works, share or publish them through rounds of refinement, then pipelines adds a layer to the second brain system that allows for you to take action on the insights you are capturing. After all, what is wisdom without action? ## Digital Gardening: Nurturing Knowledge Over Time Scaffolding and storage alone do not yield a living system. Ideas must breathe. Notes must grow. And that’s where the garden begins… Pipelines from the Second Brain system map neatly onto the concept of Digital Gardening for those who wish to create, particularly if you wish to write. Digital Gardening is a term popularised by creators like Maggie Appleton, Tom Critchlow, and Joel Hooks, as a response to the rigidness of productivity systems and the performative nature of blogs. Where traditional blogs are like polished essays, digital gardens are ever-evolving, and embrace learning in public - sharing content at its earliest draft, allowing the process of refinement and future versions to follow in an open forum. > _“A garden is never finished. It is a process of continual cultivation.”_ > — inspired by Appleton & Boulton What I find particularly helpful from the gardening metaphor is the organisational groupings by maturity of work and the encouragement to share more in a progressive state, rather than risk the time-drain of perfection. Content can typically have 3 states of maturity: - 🌱 Seedling: The initial spark of an idea or insight. Could be a question or snippet you learned or might have a reaction to. - 🌿 Budding: Progressing from seedling, budding represents the work in progress phase - content with meat on the bones but not yet a full draft. - 🌲 Evergreen: Is the content in a 'final' version, akin to what you might then publish One of the core concepts of Digital Gardening is the continuous tending to ideas - meaning you can revisit and edit pieces of work over and over again. An evergreen article might be revised multiple times, authors commonly leave a note to indicate when it was lasted edited and when the seed was first published. I like this mindset, an open mind, where change is possible and it is expected more than accepted that opinions of points of view are updated. Working in this way promotes more authenticity, reduces pressure on 'finished works' and invites feedback and community interaction, like you might find in an allotment. This also compliments Cathedral Thinking well - the gardens in which you grow the nourishment that benefit those around. ## Living Systems: Embracing an ever changing world These three practices—**Cathedral Thinking**, **Second Brain**, and **Digital Gardening**—form the foundation of my personal system. They offer architectural purpose, operational support, and living momentum. Together, they are more than tools: they are a way of thinking, building, and becoming. But a final principle sits underneath them all—**adaptability**. The world changes. You change. The seasons of your life, your energy, your purpose—they all shift. The system you design must evolve alongside you—not just accommodating change, but embracing it. It should be alive. It doesn’t resist change—it grows with it. It welcomes revision, tolerates incompletion, and remains open to new inputs. It thrives when you tend to it—not constantly, but consistently. A **Living System** is not rigid or static. Like renovating or redecorating, the rooms within my Cathedral have changed over time, spaces closed and new ones opened to accommodate new needs or consolidated to provide greater efficiency. Like the garden, the system also requires tending - and like the great structures of the world they have had multiple forms to serve variations on their purpose and usefulness. ## Building Your Foundation This is the real gift of these ideas. They’re not just frameworks for thinking. They’re invitations to **live differently**—to practice, to evolve, to build something with meaning and movement. May you build not just for today, but for the future. Tend your garden. Raise your Cathedral. And trust that what you build may one day light the path for others. #euformia #systemsdesign #digitalgardening #secondbrain #cathedralthinking #livingpractice #thoughtarchitecture --- _Note: This article sets the conceptual foundation for understanding the Cathedral System, establishing the philosophical grounding and introducing the core concepts that will be expanded upon in the follow-up piece._