In an age of information overload, a room is comforting because it's finite, often with a
specific intended purpose.
Simultaneously, a room can be flexible: you can shift its contents or even include a
temporary partition, depending on occasion. You can also position elements in spatial
juxtaposition, or create entrances to adjacent rooms through links.
In the early days of The Creative Independent, we sometimes thought of TCI's website like a house next
to a river. We considered the interviews the flowing water, as they were our house's nutrients and
source of life. We would collect and drink from the water every day. But sometimes, depending
on its nutrient makeup, the water would change our house. We'd wake up to see a new
door where a picture frame once was. Knowledge became the architect.
Like any metaphor, it's not perfect. For better or worse, it's much more
difficult to delete a building than a website.
Zooming into this room inside this house, we see a shelf. Maybe a shelf is easier
to think about than a whole room. What does one put on a shelf? Books and objects
from life? Sure, go ahead. Thankfully there's nothing too heavy on the shelf,
or else it would break. A few small things will do, knowledge containing or not.
Plus, lighter things are easy to change out. Is a book or trinket “so last year?”
Move it off the shelf! Consider what surprising juxtapositions you can make on your
little shelf.
Plants can't be rushed. They grow on their own. Your website can be the same
way, as long as you pick the right soil, water it (but not too much), and provide
adequate sunlight. Plant an idea seed one day and let it gradually grow.
Maybe it will flower after a couple of years. Maybe the next year it'll bear
fruit, if you're lucky. Fruit could be friends or admiration or money—success
comes in many forms. But don't get too excited or set goals: that's not the
idea here. Like I said, plants can't be rushed.
Fred Rogers said you can grow ideas in the garden of your mind. Sometimes, once
they're little seedlings and can stand on their own, it helps to plant them outside,
in a garden, next to the others.
Gardens have their own ways each season. In the winter, not much might happen, and
that's perfectly fine. You might spend the less active months journaling in your
notebook: less output, more stirring around on input. You need both. Plants remind
us that life is about balance.
It's nice to be outside working on your garden, just like it's nice to quietly sit
with your ideas and place them onto separate pages.
A website could also be a puddle. A puddle is a temporary collection of rainwater.
They usually appear after rainstorms. Like a storm, creating a website can happen in
a burst. Sometimes it's nice to have a few bursts/storms of creating a website,
since the zone can be so elusive. Some people even call rain “computer weather.”
There is also no state of “completeness” to a website, like a puddle, since they're
ephemeral by nature. Sometimes they can be very big and reflective. Despite their
temporal nature, I've even seen some creatures thrive in puddles. Meanwhile, some
smaller puddles may only last a day.
Not everything, even the most beautiful puddle with its incredible reflective surface,
needs to last long. If the world doesn't end tomorrow, there will be another storm.
And where there's a hole, a puddle will appear again.
Puddles evaporate slowly over time. It might be difficult, but I would love to see a
website evaporate slowly, too.
Sometimes you don't want a website that you'll have to maintain. You have other things
to do. Why not consider your website a beautiful rock with a unique shape which you spent
hours finding, only to throw it into the water until it hits the ocean floor? You will
never know when it hits the floor, and you won't care.
Thankfully, rocks are plentiful and you can do this over and over again, if you like.
You can throw as many websites as you want into the ocean. When an idea comes, find a
rock and throw it.
