The Crown, Connection and Enriching my PKM journey

I’ve been watching The Crown recently which tells us about Queen Elizabeth II’s life. I am fascinated by history and politics so I watch this very intently as a representation of the events and people involved in mid-20th century history, which is the part I’m most interested in. It features grand stately homes and castles of the British aristocracy, many of which I have pictures of myself stood outside as it’s a very British family day out to go and visit these houses as so many are open to the public now.

Being able to say “I’ve been there!” to the show’s filming locations has sparked a lot of thinking about how I want my digital systems and PKM practices to go further than links on the graph in a note-taking app.

I can’t meet famous people of the 20th century, or transport back in time to historic events. But I can hop in a car to visit a grand country house which was the scene of so much history. I can use it to look at parts of history I’ve never heard of such as the War of Spanish Succession. There is so much I don’t know so this is a lifetime of new learning and new connections to make.

So I need a system and some goals to support this.

My system needs to help me take notes on the connections between people, the houses they live in, the parts of history they’ve lived through, the films or TV shows I’ve watched that mentions them etc. It needs to help me track which actors play these famous people across modern media. For example, I find it very interesting that Harriet Walter plays Churchill’s wife in the Crown but plays Princess Margaret (also in the Crown) in another HBO show, Patrick Melrose. But I then want to use my Notion Trip Planner to plan excursions around the world to visit all these places and interact with historical sites. In reality this is going to happen on Capacities and Notion.

That’s the part on the laptop screen. Then I’d like to actually go and see all these places.

I want to use the physical experience of seeing these houses to give me new perspectives I might not get when there’s a screen in the way. I want to use these visits as a jumping off point for bringing the past into the present and understanding how it intersects with our present and future.

How does it make me feel now I understand who the people in the grand old paintings held in these houses are? Who are they related to? What does it remind me of when I’m there? What new connections do I make when experiencing something in real life vs reading about it on a screen?

It will enrich my learning no end.

I think another reason this is so exciting to me is it’s a lifelong goal. There is so much to learn and I think at this point my PKM practices are really life practices that have fundamentally changed how I see the world. A stately home is now the middle point of a graph and it’s up to me to make those connections to expand the graph and to connect it with the rest of my existing knowledge about the world.

No one is forcing me to, but I have this constant curiosity now and I really love it.

So there we go. I watched the Crown, I realised why I want to learn and why I want to connect, and I realised that knowledge work has a place outside the laptop screen too.

Brb, off to visit some stately homes.