Decay Is Computation

We treat forgetting as failure. The forest treats it as the main event.

Saprotrophic fungi break the dead down into the substrate the living will reuse. Decay is not the end of the information in a fallen log. It's a transformation of it, a slow computation whose output is soil.

Forgetting as design

Systems that never forget don't become wiser; they become landfills. The interesting question for a notebook, or a database, or a network, is the same one the forest answers constantly: what should be composted so something else can grow?

So this note, too, is scheduled for decay.