I keep a notebook in the pocket of my suit. Not the sleek digital kind that syncs to the cloud, not a tablet disguised as stationery, but a small, slightly battered paper notebook that feels like an anchor. It stays with me wherever I go. Sometimes it lies forgotten for hours, pressed flat against my chest; sometimes I pull it out three times in a ten-minute walk because a sentence, an idea, or a memory insists on being written down before it evaporates.

I have come to see it as my private fight against time—against age, against the blur of days, against the quiet deterioration of memory we all pretend won’t reach us. It is my way of holding on to the thoughts that might otherwise slip through the cracks of routine and fatigue. A scribble today might be a lifeline tomorrow: a reminder of something I felt deeply but would have forgotten if left unrecorded.

I walk everywhere now. That is something Oxford has changed in me. I walk to classes, to the pharmacy, to the parks. I walk through forests when I need solitude, and through busy streets when I want the noise to shake loose an idea. Walking has become both ritual and release: my break from the screen, my antidote to rush, my way of giving my mind time to resolve the knots it tightens through the day.

There are moments during these walks when a problem I’ve been struggling with—something about my research, a line of thought about AI, a question I can’t articulate—suddenly becomes clear. Not solved, necessarily, but visible. As if stepping away from the computer allows my brain to unclench and approach complexity from a different angle. And that moment of clarity is always fragile, always fleeting. So I stop, pull out my pen, and write.

It might be a fragment of a sentence. It might be a sketch of an idea. Sometimes it is simply a description of something I noticed: the way sunlight filters through a canopy, the quiet of a near-empty street, the sudden memory of a person I miss. Not all of it is profound. Not all of it ever becomes anything. But the notebook doesn’t ask for justification. It only asks that I pay attention.

That is the real reason I keep it. Attention. In a world that demands speed, I want something that asks me to slow down. In a field where everything is optimized, automated, and digitized, I want the resistance of paper and ink. My work revolves around artificial intelligence—systems capable of extraordinary processing power, capable of remembering and retrieving information in ways that outstrip human capacity. And yet nothing feels as powerful to me as a pen meeting a blank page, creating meaning from silence.

Maybe it is because writing by hand requires something from me that typing does not. It forces intention. It demands presence. And it keeps me tethered to the physical world, even as my research takes me deep into the virtual one.

The notebook also reassures me that my thoughts matter, even the small ones. That ideas deserve space to breathe before they are polished or judged. That memory is not something we preserve automatically, but something we must actively cultivate.

Sometimes I flip through old pages and find something I wrote months ago—a line, an observation, a fear—and I’m startled by how much it reveals about who I was then. Those pages become a map of my own becoming.

One day, maybe, my handwriting will falter, or my memory will dim, or the speed of life will overwhelm my ability to hold everything in my head. But I hope that when that time comes, I will still have these notebooks: imperfect, ink-stained, and entirely mine.

A small rebellion against forgetting. A reminder that even in an age of machines, the most powerful tool I carry is still a pen in my hand.