Gathering and pruning

When I stopped writing after the sigil note, it’s not that I stopped writing or collecting excerpts. I just did it in the notes app. I also regularly delete my notes.

I don’t like writing. I think it reifies things too early and puts a brake on my imagination. But I also think there is value in writing to help me categorize my thoughts.

So writing notes is a compromise, I can edit and merge and chop and rearrange them at will, and just throw them away at some point.

However, writing privately doesn’t fully do the other thing I want to do by writing things down. Move on. I want to write down a thought precisely so that I can move on from it.

I write or collect a bunch of notes, then periodically something in me forces me to decimate them. The itch is to truly prune, delete everything, but that is fundamentally at odds with the desire to have a public continuity, so I have accepted out of sight out of mind as a reasonable substitute, and I do that by redesigning my homepage periodically. I can’t see the older pages, so they don’t exist, but the links continue to work.