Why You Should Reread Your Notes

What a sleepless Persian king taught me about rereading what I've recorded

I started a thinking session in Ember the other day with a line that looks like a throwaway line but isn’t one at all.

“And when the report was investigated and found to be true, the two officials were impaled on poles. All this was recorded in the book of the annals in the presence of the king.” — Esther 2:23

I stopped at “the book of the annals.” What is that?

Turns out it was the running record kept for Persian kings — the events, the decisions, the reports. A diary for the empire. A journal for the king. Everything written down, day after day, whether it seemed important or not.

Here’s what was recorded that day: a man named Mordecai overheard two officials plotting to assassinate King Xerxes. He reported it. The plot was foiled. The moment went into the book.

And then — nothing. No reward. No parade. Mordecai went back to sitting at the king’s gate. The entry just sat there in the annals, unread.

An open loop.

The night the king couldn’t sleep

Four chapters later, King Xerxes can’t sleep. So he calls for the book of the annals and has it read to him.

He turns to the record.

And as the record is read, that old entry surfaces: Mordecai once saved the king’s life. Xerxes asks, “What honor has been given to Mordecai for this?” The answer: nothing. Nothing has been done for him.

At that exact moment, Haman — the man actively plotting to have Mordecai killed — walks into the court. The king asks him how to honor a man the king delights in. Haman, assuming it’s about himself, describes the celebration in lavish detail. Royal robes. The king’s horse. A procession through the city square.

Then the king says: do all of that for Mordecai.

None of it happens if the moment was never written down. And none of it happens if what was written down was never revisited.

The power isn’t in the writing

That’s the part I keep chewing on. We talk a lot about capturing ideas — write it down, save the highlight, clip the quote. And capture matters. But the annals sat in the royal archive for years doing nothing. The record only became powerful the night someone reread it.

The writing preserves. The revisiting resurrects.

And the timing of the resurrection matters too. If Mordecai had been honored immediately — the night he reported the plot — the story changes completely. There’s no dramatic reversal. Haman never has to lead his enemy through the streets. The open loop needed to stay open until the right moment.

Some of what you’ve written down isn’t dormant. It’s waiting.

Refreshing vs. rereading

Here’s my honest confession: when I can’t sleep — when something’s gnawing at me — my instinct is to hunt for something new. Refresh the Substack feed. Check the inbox. Scroll for the next thing.

Notice what Xerxes didn’t do. He didn’t call for wine. He didn’t reach for his era’s version of the endless scroll — the entertainment, the distraction, the numbing thing.

He wasn’t refreshing the feed. He was looking for something old.

And the old thing is what opened his eyes, saved a life, and toppled the man plotting murder in his court. The new thing would have numbed him back to sleep. The old thing woke him up.

I want that kind of instinct — the discipline to say no to the things that numb me and yes to the things that soften me. To reach for my own book of annals: the journal entries, the notes, the recorded moments and decisions and awkward, funny, ordinary days. To reread them and let things bubble up. To find the open loops still waiting for their chapter six.

So here’s the question I’m sitting with, and I’ll hand it to you too:

What’s keeping you from revisiting your own book of annals?

For me, it’s the hunt for something new. But the story I needed was already written down. I just had to go back and read it.

---

This whole post began as a thinking session in Ember — the app I built for exactly this. Ember is a place to sit with an idea, think it through slowly, and keep a record of where your mind went. And like the king’s annals, it doesn’t just store your sessions — it brings the old ones back to you at the right moment, so the loops you left open can find their chapter six.

If you want a book of annals of your own, start your first thinking session in Ember.

---