Making Small Marks

Whether we're working or just walking around the city, some things catch our attention for no obvious reason. They don't have to be important. Most of the time, if we were asked why we noticed them, we probably couldn't explain. An outfit in an old magazine. Something someone happened to say. The way a person on the street is dressed. The shape of a plant on the balcony. A shop we thought we'd look up later, or a photo we took without really knowing why. When we find something like that, we make a small mark.

We stick a Post-it on a magazine page. We draw a line with a red pencil, or add an asterisk. When we spot someone wearing something we like, we might take a photo and circle them later. Sometimes we even add a little mark to a plant we've been looking at, just because something about it caught our eye.

Working as editors, we make marks all the time. But why do we need to mark things in the first place? The easiest answer is so we don't forget. But we feel that saving something and marking something aren't quite the same.

These days, we can save almost anything. We take photos and screenshots, save links, drop pins on maps, bookmark posts. Before we know it, our phones are full of things we may or may not ever look at again.

And still, every now and then, we want to mark one of them again.

When we make a mark, we don't change the thing itself. We can put an asterisk on a magazine page from twenty years ago, but the clothes in the picture stay the same. We can circle someone in a photograph, but their outfit doesn't change. We can add something to a picture of a plant, but the plant knows nothing about it.

What changes is the way we look at it. There's something about this. Maybe a mark is no more than that: a small way for us to say that something has caught our attention.

And we don't always know why. A magazine we marked years ago might suddenly connect with something we saw on the street yesterday. A red line on a piece of paper and a photograph sitting on our phone might, years apart, seem to be telling us the same thing. That's when we might find a new question.

Instead of starting by looking for an answer, we can start by making small marks on the things that catch our attention. We keep something we don't have a name for yet. We leave it there for a while, then come back to it. Sometimes we begin to see a thin line between things we thought had nothing to do with each other. Whether we're doing it physically or digitally, perhaps what we're doing hasn't changed all that much.

When we make a mark, we're not necessarily saying, this is important. We're saying something more like, we don't know why yet, but there might be something here.

Maybe we find questions somewhere between one mark and another.