We have become archivists of the self, I thought, curators of a life half-lived. Each countless photograph of a wonder, of dinner, of a view, of our children, of the utter banality of our everyday lives, was not a memento, a way of remembering the things we did, but instead evidence of the poverty of our engagement with the present moment.

The lesson here,” the artist Joshua Citarella once wrote, “is that we often don't know what the important work is while we’re making it…you may look back a decade from now and realize that the real work was actually what you were putting online.”

Sammelband: A set of disparate texts, separately printed and later gathered in a single binding

(If you do not have a subscription or do not have the means to get one, type archive.is/newest/ right before the URL of the article. Again, I am not encouraging this! Just putting it out there that internet archives exist ).

For me, carving out the time for writing—even when there's a million and five other things that need to get done—is pivotal in STRETCHING time.

It's pretty simple: the days I write, I have more space inside.

“There’s a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting,” from Slowness by Milan Kundera.

Grow your own flowers and give them away to everyone you meet. You’re right: the earth is not very fertile, people are not always grateful, flowers eventually die. But do you still see the point of it all? Do you see the beauty of the gesture?

Finding the right-fit homes for your writing takes time and continual experimentation. Building supportive systems is part of making a writing practice that feels true to you .