Let’s just burn it.

I found a writer whose material intrigued me, and like so many other things I find on the net when I’m doing something else, I bookmarked her site to go back to later. That was back in October of 2011, maybe an eon ago in Internet time, but for those of me who are in our 50s, not that long ago, really. Anyway, “later” finally arrived around the middle of January 2012, and I clicked the bookmark I’d tagged “website,” “design,” “I like this,” and “inspiration,” only to find that the site was gone.

Not the kind of gone you see when Google tells you it can’t find the server you’ve requested, but gone as in she deleted all of the content. Gone as in there’s one placeholder page left. That freaked me out a little bit, but I saw that she had an email list and I signed up for that, and she’s posting over at Google+, so I followed her there, and then I signed up for her Twitter feed. Two days later she deleted her Twitter account. And she talked in one of her emails about how she was mourning the loss of it.

Even now, when I think of it, my face gets all contorted into that “WTF” look.

A little backstory on my state: it took me a while to let go of the idea that I had to make a copy of everything I found on the web that I liked, or that was interesting, or that I might want to delve more deeply into later. In the beginning, it was… the beginning. No one knew what the web was going to be, some people thought it was a fad that would be over in a couple of years. So I did a lot of printing. But after a while, it began to look like no one ever deleted anything, at least not on purpose. Sites might be taken down for non-payment, but if the content was on a free hosting platform or someone was paying the bills, it was like having an infinite library. My anxiety level went down. I trusted that I didn’t have to save all of it.

Back to the present. The writer asked for feedback on what resonated with us for January, and I shared my bewilderment. I’ve been on the net since the 90s, but I’ve been pretty quiet, mostly lurking and building behind the scenes. Dr. Brene Brown’s TED talk on vulnerability and her books opened me up in a lot of ways, and I’ve been sort of pushing myself into the connection pool more lately. So the writer asked, and I responded. I told her I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea of deleting something that you would mourn the loss of.

And she wrote an email to her list about that topic. She lumped the website and the Twitter account into a pile with domain names she bought but never used and old email accounts. And I totally get the email thing, I’ve been through a few myself. I have empathy for the domain name collection, I have over 50 of them. I understand the spark of an idea that seems like it could be really cool that you don’t develop for whatever reason, lack of time, or lack of more than just the spark. I’ll be letting some of those go this time around as well. I’ll think of them fondly, and I’ve written down the ideas that prompted me to buy the domains, but I’m to a point that I won’t mourn them. It won’t really be painful for me to let them go.

But this is the part that bewilders me. She’s a writer. She went to the trouble of building an audience of people who read what she wrote, both on her blog and in her Twitter feed. She appears to want to connect with her audience, to meet their needs as readers. And maybe I missed some announcements, maybe it wasn’t a surprise to her regular readers. But when she deleted the blog and the Twitter account, she didn’t just delete those things from her own head space. She didn’t delete those things in a vacuum. She deleted them from other people’s lives, too. And it wasn’t really necessary.

The Buddha never wrote anything down himself, but the Sanghas did. And it was all on paper, and not the thin lightweight stuff we have now. Paper was a big, difficult deal. So it’s all ephemeral, right? What if the Sanghas decided that all that paper was taking up too much space under the tree or in the huts, and was too darned heavy to be moving around, and they were focusing too much time and energy and thought on preserving all that paper? And they said, hey, let’s just burn it, if we keep it someone will just get attached to it anyway. It’s just air.

I’m thankful, for myself, that they didn’t do that, that they went to the trouble and spent the energy to save those words, that air, for me to read so many years later.

But my paradigm has been rearranged for me. The Internet is not a book. I can’t trust that the gem of comfort or wisdom I found, and couldn’t fully digest at the time because I was working, will be there when I go back. I’m not sure exactly what this means for me yet. I know I won’t go back to printing it all out. But I won’t be comfortable just bookmarking and tagging any more.