Digital gardening

Going through my life, I often notice swarm of ideas buzzing in my mind. Ideas, knowledge bits, opinions, thoughts. Whenever reading book, watching movie or engaging in conversation, thoughts are forming which I would like to share with others or at least preserve for myself. Often enough though, those ideas eventually slip out of my grasp and vanish into thin air like dream not written down.

Like with a particularly vivid dream, we suspect that obviously we couldn’t forget that. But both remembrance of dream and interesting thought disappear quicker than we expected. The most common advice for remembering dreams is to keep dream diary, in summary: “write it down!”

Some people protest, “I couldn’t write dreams down, because I don’t remember them at all even just after waking up!” But as many people can attest, first just intention of writing down makes more likely to remember them. Second, when we manage to write down at least one dream, it’s easier to recollect dreams later. And when we make habit out of it, dreams seem to never be gone at all.

Similarly, writing down our thoughts let us keep them. But effects are not limited to preservation. Both intention and habit of writing is transformative, as seen with dream diary. We can notice dreams or ideas more often, more intentionally. Neil Gaiman advices prospective writers to write their story ideas as soon as they pop up in mind.

I always found pleasure in writing, either through short stories or long replies to forum threads back in the days. Desire to write more consistently, in more organized manner, connecting disparate notes – it always lingered somewhere in the back of my mind. So, I was writing here and there, sometimes on paper in notebooks which I promptly forgotten, reviewing books and movies in various places, leaving comments under someone else posts or videos, preparing lists of books-to-read in separate files.

For a long time, I have been thinking about carving my own little space in the Internet. Place where those disparate activities won’t disperse and dissipate but could, hopefully, synergize to create something better than sum of its parts. Somewhere along the way I found this concept of “digital garden” and its little niche community. Digital gardening seems like perfect for my needs.

To get some picture of what the heck digital garden is, think about the blog. On technical level we could say that blog is website with posts published with reversed chronological order. Newest posts at the top, oldest hidden somewhere at the bottom. We all know that form now, if not through already old-fashioned blogs, then through social media and their feeds. Digital gardens channel forms even older than the blogs. Those of personal websites of old times, with their little chaotic structure, full of quirks and idiosyncrasies of its custodian, more customizable.

Digital gardens are not focused on publishing fully made posts. They rather plant rough drafts and tend to them, allow them to grow over time. They are not focused on ordering its elements chronologically, but rather creates its unique ecology of connections and various paths across the website.

This slow, organic growth is for me one of the biggest appeals of digital gardens. I’m not the only one who admits that the hardest part of doing anything creative is to start. Actually, working on any given project paradoxically tends to be often much easier than starting itself. The other blocker is perfectionism, which probably is also reason why we are afraid of starting. Digital garden creates mindset that helps to avoid these problems. I don’t create full ready-made polished posts. I create small rough drafts that I can slowly improve. Instead of working on full essay and spew them after done, one day I create only small snippet, another adds quotation.

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