It is also about the capacity to tend to myself like I am a growing, living, person, not an object to be beaten into shape. A person who has organic, shifting, complex feelings. Sometimes things fail and that is simply part of life. Flowers wither, and you could give your best care to a plant and it will still die.
This is poignant.
I knew if I wanted this website – which is an extension of my consciousness – to truly thrive, I needed to work on it in a sustainable manner. Bit by bit I slowly transformed the way I thought about it. Previously I would only work on it if I had the energy to make wholesale, dramatic changes. These days I am glad if I made one small change.
Winnie later goes on to point out that this is much like gardening: it is a slow process, and the process has its seasons which wax and wane, expanding and contracting. You sow. You seed. You water. You fertilize. You wait. You pick weeds. You water. Pick some more weeds. You might prune. You flick off the japanese beetles. And because of the cyclical nature of the planet we inhabit, we also have periods where nothing grows, and the soil lies dormant. Waiting. Resting. This, too, can be embraced as we carve out our little corners of the web, and really all aspects of our lives. I know I'm nearly as tender to myself as I should be.
The first one is Synchronous Active Reading, where you have your index cards, notebook or Roam database open alongside the text and immediately write down the quotes and thoughts you have. The opposite is Asynchronous Active Reading, where you only have your book/paper and a pen or highlighter. If you do Asynchronous Active Reading, you'll need to return later to copy over the notes you took in the margins and the parts you copied over to your final storage medium.
Ryan Holiday recommends annotating/highlighting/marking up your book, and not processing it/making notes until you've been away from the book for at least a week. It sounds nice on paper, but I find that I ignore my highlights and notes the second I'm done with the book, and don't revisit them unless I read the book again.
Highlight Dementia - the face you make when you go back through your highlights and you're like "whaaa...why did I highlight this, this is useless?!".
This is a bad habit of mine. Lately on my Kindle I've been trying to avoid this by only highlighting if I have a concrete note to make about it (I find often that I don't have anything to see, which makes me think that I have a bad habit of highlighting things just because they sound nice)
Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that reminds people you exist. Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.
Thinking a lot about permanency on the web - there is so much amazing work that exists on the web, and so much of it is already lost because it was written and saved on websites that have come and gone. IndieWeb.org attempts to address this with its principles: https://indieweb.org/principles