Why I Keep Binders

People often ask me why I keep so many binders. Shelves of them. Heavy, overstuffed, their spines bowed from years of pages pressed inside. To some, they might look like clutter. To me, they are a living archive — the heartbeat of my work.

Each binder holds more than paper. They hold seasons of my life: ritual notes scribbled in candlelight, grocery lists that became recipes, sketches of product ideas that would one day find their way into your hands. They hold the scent of the room I was in, the pen I favored that year, the way the light fell across my desk when I wrote.

I keep binders because memory is fragile. We think we’ll remember the details — the exact shade of the sky on the day we decided to change our lives, the words someone spoke that shifted everything — but memory fades. Paper doesn’t. Ink doesn’t. My binders are my way of catching the moments before they slip away.

They are also my safeguard against the speed of the world. Technology moves fast — and I love it for that. I use AI, I search, I research, I explore. But my binders are slow. They ask me to pause, to write by hand, to let ideas breathe before they’re polished. They remind me that the magic in my work doesn’t come from the tool, but from the human hand and heart that shape it.

Every product I make begins here, in these pages. Not in a spreadsheet, not in a digital file, but in the messy, tactile, imperfect beauty of my own handwriting. The binders are proof — to myself and to anyone who wonders — that my work is rooted in something real, something I’ve touched, turned over, and lived with.

Someday, these binders will outlive me. They’ll tell my story in my own words, in my own ink. They’ll carry the rituals, the recipes, the ideas, and the everyday magic I’ve gathered. And maybe, when someone opens them years from now, they’ll feel what I felt when I wrote them: that life is worth recording, and that the smallest details are often the most sacred.