The Art Of Not Asking Why

Marisabel is hosting this month’s IndieWeb Carnival, and the theme is Pages.¹ I thought I’d add my version to this appealing topic.

The first thing I realized while thinking about pages is that it’s a concept, a dynamic idea, not paper pages, as I initially thought. To me, the word pages automatically connects with paper because much of my life has been tied to paper pages. I’ve tried carrying around a pocket notebook to write down my thoughts and capture ideas several times, but it never stuck. In these notebooks, the idea of a page was an important limitation: I wanted a page dedicated to each morning, no more, no less.

In digital format, my pages stop being physical. When I think of “pages” in my digital realm, I naturally gravitate toward my Denote info-notes, a collection of how-to guides I write for myself. It looks like this:

20261017T203856–glove80__equipment.org
20261015T100231–getting-and-cleaning-user-emails-from-listserv.org
20231012T205107–self-care-personal__health.org
20260219T235651–mpv-stuff__linux.org
20240922T160409–people-at-work.org
20260220T083149–taking-time-off-sme.org
0250910T104825–onboarding-todo-list.org

This list of items looks messy at first, but it is carefully organized by topic and tabs, some of which are not visible in this example. These pages have replaced my online wiki (or digital garden) for several reasons, and these are the last pages I write, at least conceptually.

This idea that I no longer write in pages didn’t sit well with me. I spend a big chunk of my day writing: I write posts, like the one you’re reading now; I write emails both for work and pleasure; I write some fiction on the side; and I often write in my journal. Isn’t writing measured in pages?

Apparently not for me.

Without pages, I don’t have the same limitation I had in my notebooks. There are others, sure, but they are not as clear and concise as pages in a notebook. Time is an obvious limitation, but I don’t always have the same amount of it when I start, and depending on how my day goes, I might have more or less of it. Word count is even more ambiguous, and I don’t care about it on a computer. My energy and writing “mood” is yet another ever-changing limitation. A new possible restriction is my new keyboard and my desk — I don’t like to write on a different keyboard or away from my desk for long².

If nothing limits my writing and I can almost always write, does it mean writing is underappreciated without pages?

I thought about it for a minute and decided that, for me, this isn’t the case. To me, writing is talking and thinking. It’s too much of a habit to be valued in such terms because it happens — and needs to happen — all the time. This is one of the reasons I stopped using a notebook: it was too limiting. It was also chaotic and disorganized (my horrible handwriting making it much worse) to the point that retrieval later was nearly impossible, another reason I often write: to remember.

Still, the pages from my journals that I wrote in my early 20s, some in my native language but mostly in English, are human and me in a way my journal entries (that’s how I call them in the digital realm, entries, just as my blog texts are posts, even if they are unpublished drafts) will never be. I thought about humanizing my entries in pages again — that of a book. But that’s one big mountain I’m not climbing right now.

And so, the time limit kicks in, and it’s time to move on with the day. I will think more about pages — those that I think about and those that others have.