I am quite new to this idea of Digital Gardening, as I was searching for a medium that can hold my thoughts as well as to give me that creative freedom which feels exciting to pursue. I do not have a hate relation with the mainstream social platforms like Instagram and Youtube, in fact I believe they are extremely powerful in terms of resource and reach but putting up my thoughts over there taught me something new that I do not enjoy unnecessary loudness, nor do I like to fit in a way to be more relatable. I started valuing my core personality which yearns for building in silence, in private, booming feels natural to me and hence this garden came into existence.

I have used blog based mediums in the past, from Tumblr to Reddit, but the fact of being under control of some company who wants to push certain content just because of its profits always bothered me. I found being genuine is not what drives the algorithm but rather the amount of reach it can pull. So to tackle all this, I desired to have something which is away from all these, and to have that freedom - I created something of my own.

Keeping the base ready

I have been a writing baby since long and every major twist and turn in my life has been jotted down somewhere, so to start a blog website required to learn few additional skills on top of that. I firstly hit my head to learn HTML and CSS, these two are core technologies used to build a web page. As I remember being taught in class X that I chose not to take it seriously back then, which resulted to do it again from the beginning. It took me nearly a week to understand all of that, and then I started applying few terminal commands on mac to run it locally.¹For the framework, Astro felt like the right choice and among its themes, I felt drawn to Chiri²by its simplicity and cuteness. After then, all I needed was to sync it with my Obsidian Vault which generates my written thoughts in .md file . Once everything was set tightly, purchasing a domain to publish was the final step and Hostinger felt cheap and secured. I threw up few of my writings on the website and liked the way how they looked. To keep the flow of publishing frictionless, I set up GitHub account and linked my repository with Vercel, that allowed me to publish on the internet with a single Ctrl + Shift + S keyboard shortcut.

Planting the seeds

I stopped reading after I joined Philosophy in Masters and even during the course I read nothing, I relied entirely on LLMs which made me lazy to an extent that reading a single page felt like a task. I knew it needed to be changed. I picked up few of my novels which I loved and to my surprise, the friction was less than I thought it’d be. After lingering on few topics, I felt like extending the idea through my own writing and by then I had already gotten myself into the flow, something you can see in this blog post as one example.

What made me the happiest was going back to my collection of science magazines which I used to read during COVID, I remember every night was a star gazing event. A few of Youtubers³that I loved in the past who made juicy content on Science, started getting into my feed again. It was like living in the past with curiosity of a child but the brain of an adult. I rarely felt overwhelmed by these topics but I knew that If I did not let them flow intermittently, I might end up losing the threads.

Watering the plants

My new tab is a garden of developing thoughts. Ideas that are gathered from books, articles, videos are planted and nurtured here. I synced Obsidian with all my devices so to have an option to write down quickly before it fleets away with time. Thoughts are transient in nature, hence most of them get planted, watered and eroded by the time I plan to write, so having the tools available is important for this digital garden to exist. Not to mention that some thoughts are recurring,⁴which means that I haven’t processed them properly thus they are important to handle, as I start writing about it I get to know if it’s worth watering for the longer run or better left to die, but the fact that I like giving them a chance to nurture is itself satisfying.

Once I start growing the plant, I tend to give it a shape that I like. Of course, I have understood by now that nothing is entirely genuine⁵and we all tend to copy things either consciously or subconsciously. I still try to dip it into my flavor, wrap it up and present it with my own branding.

Everything is already being said long time ago, but the implication and understanding of it is personal - Carl Jung

Pulling the weeds

I’ve always liked the feeling of possibility. The idea that I could learn one more thing, start one more project, explore one more curiosity. For a while, I treated every interesting opportunity as something that deserved a place in my life. What I’ve been slow to understand is that it’s not necessary to have the desire to know everything, even if it seems noble⁶to have it. My problem has never been a lack of curiosity, If anything, it’s the opposite. I find too many things fascinating. Every book opens ten new doors, every conversation points me toward another subject worth exploring. The result is a growing collection of unfinished paths, each one competing for the same limited attention. By setting up this garden, I am categorizing my thoughts in hierarchy so to focus accordingly.

I refute the notion that we should control our thoughts, I can’t do it, I don’t have that Sage power, rather I preach to invite every thoughts with open arms. Once I put the spotlight to one of them, it automatically takes away attention from others and hence the filter gets applied naturally.

We are all constantly bombarded with information, a lot of it is really good information too, but the challenge is absorbing it and applying it to the context of our lives and careers - Joel Hooks

Ending note

I am learning to do things imperfectly, that does not mean that I put in sub-level effort. Looking back at writing from a year ago, makes me cringe a little but like this garden, It’ll evolve with time so I need not to feel pressurized by my own creative standards.⁷ There is no final state here, just like my thoughts which are always in a state of flux, this place shall change with time as well.

Through this, I am making an effort to keep my thoughts open in public, I tend to share my success, failures and everything in between with the intent of someone getting inspired by looking at it, learns from mistakes I made, then my reason for putting this online will be even sweeter.