I’m writing because I'm thinking
I'm cleaning up. I had a week off and started cleaning up. At the beginning of 2024, I started using Obsidian, but after a few weeks I stopped using it on my own. Why? I don't know. That's just how I am, I get bored quickly sometimes.
Recently, I went back to it. I organised my notes, developed my own system for collecting notes, and started using it as my only application for collecting various things.
While tidying up, I came across a quote by Leslie Lampart (the creator of LaTeX), which read: ‘If you're thinking without writing, you only think you're thinking’.
I remembered these words when I read Robert's post entitled "Write whatever whenever". It's a funny and witty expansion of the acronym “WWW” known as the "World Wide Web".
He referred to a beautiful idea found on the BinaryDigit blog. Its author wrote: "I don't blog here as often because I tend to want to make posts about a significant event that's happened, or about a “topic”. But honestly that's not what having a blog is about. I should feel free to write whenever I have a thought longer than a Mastodon post. I made my low-effort alternate blog for everyday journaling, and it's helped me realise that I just need to write more casually".
I strongly agree with what BinaryDigit wrote and what Robert wrote: "In the world of blogging, the www bit stands for: Write Whatever Whenever.
My latest blogging adventure has been going on since 2024 and I am still looking for my blogging style. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I treat it as my path. A path that leads through my thoughts, which sometimes follow a straight path and sometimes bumpy roads. However, regardless of whether I feel like writing down a one-sentence thought or a multi-paragraph reflection, I am guided by something that Leslie Lampart beautifully put into words: "If you're thinking without writing, you only think you're thinking". So I’m writing because I'm thinking.
Sometimes the simplest solutions are the hardest to come up with. But maybe that's why writing sometimes gets in our way. Write it down, forget it, but know where you wrote it down. Come back to it someday. Perhaps by accident. And maybe that's when you'll come up with the solution to a problem.