shorette.com · seeds

№ 021 · a note

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 03:38:00 -0500

Some people take up so little of your time, even when you wish they would take more. Yet somehow, they take up so much of your mind. And that’s far more precious a resource.

Cut them out then? Maybe. I’m not sure I’m in the right state of mind to decide.

Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being & walk away…

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 10:12:00 -0500

Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being & walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, & the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.

— Søren Kierkegaard

№ 019 · a note

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:58:46 -0500

It’s the kind of night where you miss someone who isn’t missing you back. I’ve learned to be okay with that, I think. There’s a world I still visit sometimes. You’re never there. I go anyway. Almost reaching out, then not.

№ 018 · a note

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 00:41:00 -0500

It seems like plenty of great thinkers have arrived at the same paradoxical conclusion that the capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. I think this makes sense when you take a little time to analyze it: if you need the other person, you are turning the other person into a possession/resource. If you are “full” independently, then that turns love into a gift. You can grant the other absolute freedom because whether they stay or leave does not affect your core. I will not cite the exact hadith, but the Prophet made it clear that true riches is self-contentment. What you don’t receive from the other, the other cannot take. Two solitudes protect, touch and greet each other.

Leads to Rilke on patience, Letters to a Young Poet.

№ 017 · a note

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 18:22:43 -0500

Just discovered a book called Love Letters by Khalil Gibran where it documents a lifetime of deep romantic letters between him and the Lebanese-Palestinian poet May Ziadeh even though they never met. I’m just asking: me and who?

№ 016 · a note

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 08:17:00 -0500

Rain before work, the kind that makes the street look varnished. I stood at the window longer than the coffee required. Nothing was decided in those minutes, but the day that followed was better for them, and I have stopped asking that kind of time to justify itself.

№ 015 · a note

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 20:09:00 -0500

Walked the long way home to finish a thought. It did not finish, but it loosened, which is often the useful part. Speed is good for errands and bad for questions.

Commonplace book

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 19:26:00 -0500

Commonplace book (en.wikipedia.org)

The lineage this page hopes to join. Locke kept a formal index for his; I am making do with tags and good intentions.

Against the clean slate

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 19:15:00 -0500

Every few months I want to begin again from nothing: new notes, new system, new folder with a confident name. The urge always arrives dressed as clarity, and it is almost always avoidance.

The honest version of the impulse is that the old material has become hard to face. Not disorganised — faced. There are half-finished arguments in there, and opinions I have quietly outgrown, and evidence that I was wrong in writing. A clean slate makes all of that disappear without the work of disagreeing with myself.

What I do instead now is smaller and slower. I keep the old leaves and add a line beneath the ones I no longer believe. The record stops being a monument and becomes a conversation, which is harder to be proud of and much more useful to read.

A slate that is never wiped accumulates something a fresh one cannot: proof that I have changed. That is the only kind of progress I have learned to trust.

Leads to #meta.

№ 013 · a seed

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 22:11:00 -0500

A thought written down is a thought you can argue with.

Everything is gestation and then bringing forth.

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 06:12:00 -0500

Everything is gestation and then bringing forth.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

On the honesty of clocks

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 13:04:00 -0500

Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river. ¹

I keep returning to this line. The river image only works because the water is moving — a still river is just a pond. The honesty of a clock is the same: it refuses to let the moment pool.

Borges, J.L. (1946). A New Refutation of Time. ↩︎

Leads to the life-counter.

№ 011 · a note

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 09:12:00 -0500

Coffee, then the long task of making a homepage feel inhabited rather than just tidy.

№ 010 · a seed

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 21:58:00 -0500

Privacy is not a wall you build once. It is a practice, like tidiness, and it fails the same way: quietly, by small permissions.

№ 009 · a note

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 09:31:00 -0500

A good question survives its first answer. If the answer closes the subject, I was probably asking about a fact; if the answer opens three more rooms, I was asking about something worth carrying.

What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one who asks, I know not.

Thu, 28 May 2026 07:26:00 -0500

What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one who asks, I know not.

— Augustine, Confessions XI

№ 007 · a seed

Sun, 03 May 2026 20:14:00 -0500

Two kinds of patience: waiting, and continuing. Only one of them is a virtue.

On tools that teach

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 16:20:00 -0500

A good tool does two jobs. It finishes the work in front of you, and it changes what you believe the work is. The first job is the one we shop for. The second is the one that shapes us.

A hand plane teaches grain. A debugger teaches that a program is a sequence of states rather than a paragraph of intentions. Neither lesson appears in the manual, and both survive long after the particular task is forgotten.

So I have grown suspicious of tools that finish the work without teaching anything. They are not evil; they are simply expensive in a currency that does not show up on the invoice. When the tool leaves, the understanding leaves with it, and I am exactly as capable as I was before I began.

The test I apply now is small: after using this thing for a month, will I know something I could explain to another person? If the answer is no, I try to keep the tool at arm’s length, and do at least one pass by hand.

In praise of the unfinished shelf

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 20:48:00 -0500

There is a shelf here of things abandoned: two half-built programs, a translation that stalled at the third page, and a set of notes for an essay I no longer agree with. For years I thought of it as evidence of failure.

I have changed my mind. The shelf is where the ideas go that were not wrong, only early. Twice now something from it has come back and finished itself quickly, because the difficult part had already been done and left to cool.

The condition is that the shelf must stay visible. Abandoned work hidden in an archive is simply lost; abandoned work in plain sight is a standing offer. I walk past it most days, and every so often it accepts.

Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 22:53:00 -0500

Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.

— Simone Weil, Waiting for God

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 21:05:00 -0500

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

— Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

№ 004 · a seed

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 19:41:00 -0500

Every catalogue is an argument about what matters, pretending to be a list.

№ 003 · a note

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 06:24:00 -0500

The morning does not owe me clarity. I owe the morning attendance. On the days I remember which direction the debt runs, the work goes considerably better.

Nothing is ours except time.

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 06:57:00 -0500

Nothing is ours except time.

— Seneca, Letters to Lucilius

What the notebook knows

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 20:26:00 -0600

The useful thing about a notebook is not that it remembers. It is that it disagrees. Memory is a diplomat; it smooths the record until the past appears to have led sensibly to the present. Paper has no such manners.

I went back this week to entries from four years ago, expecting continuity, and found a person confidently certain of two things I now think are false. There was no gradual revision in between. The change happened somewhere off the page, and I would have sworn under oath that I had always believed the later version.

That is the whole case for keeping a record: not nostalgia, and not productivity, but the ability to be contradicted by primary evidence. It is the cheapest available protection against becoming a person who has never been wrong.

Leads to #meta.

№ 001 · a seed

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 18:44:00 -0600

A tidy desk is not a sign of a tidy mind. It is a sign that the mind wanted somewhere quiet to sit.