Minerva's Manor

So, today I did something that has set my teeth on edge: I inadvertently deleted 22,000 emails from my various Gmail accounts. Not put them in the trash – deleted forever.

Why did I do this? Long story. And that’s actually not important.

What is important is observing how I felt and the stages of feelings that occurred to me in a mere 10 hours since the event.

At first, the idea of losing every single email I had written since, well, I first had email was a huge loss. Loss of data, loss of connection, loss of a sense of self. There was a lot of swearing in the first first minutes.

Then the ringing in my ears started: what if someone asks me for something? What if I need to refer back to this old email or that one. Or someone asks me about something I sent them five years ago.

That was a good few hours of panic. And then I started getting nostalgic for the sentimental emails: the ones back and forth when I bought my house, the ones with my family in NC when my dad died. The one that had the wedding speech I made at my goddaughter’s ceremony.

And then, for a few hours, my mind was very quiet. Much too quiet. I thought: what am I without this history of emails? It’s as if I’ve been plunged into witness protection, and have no past. Only today.

And then I began to smile. How freeing it is to have no history, no past. Only what happens today. Only what I make of this moment. And this one.

It’s amazing to me how we define ourselves by our digital presence. Similar to how we define ourselves in the physical world, we equate depth, breadth (and girth) with value. But shouldn’t the measure of ourselves be not in what we hoard in terms of material, or even digital, possessions, but rather in the experiences themselves and the compassion that we give to others?

Am I going to come across moments when I will need a thing or two that I no longer have in my saved email, sure. But I should be able to ask someone for help in providing a copy of what I lost, and hope that their sense of compassion will fulfill that lack of information.

This exercise seems like a forced exercise someone like Marie Kondo would do. But rather than decluttering my clothes closet, I rid myself of all the digital clutter in my virtual closet. And I suddenly feel free.

Free to start anew. To shed what no longer fits in my journey right now, which makes way for new things. Like this blog.

There are two reasons we can’t let go:  an attachment to the past or a fear for the future.

Marie Kondo

I recently received an email from my company that stated, in order to upgrade my computer to Windows 10, I had to install additional RAM onto my laptop. As I am a remote employee, I had two options: send my laptop back and have them do it, or, have them send me the RAM, and attempt to do it myself.

Being slightly smarter than the average bear, I decided it would be unproductive to send the computer back and opted to do it myself. The IT dept sent me a YouTube video from the laptop manufacturer, saying it would be “about a 10 minute job”, and all I would need in terms of tools, was a small Phillips head screwdriver for the tiny screws on the base on the laptop.

The RAM arrived the next day, and I rolled up my sleeves, gripped my teeny Phillips screwdriver, and pressed play on the YouTube video, carefully queued on my iPad, ready for the 10-minute job.

In less than five minutes, I managed to crack the entire bottom of the laptop, from the Ethernet port, almost clear over to the battery area.

The gasp might have been audible all the way to the company HQ. I slowly backed away from the laptop, and immediately contacted IT. They told me to send them my laptop, and they would overnight a new laptop, already upgraded, to me.

True to their word, the new laptop arrived the next morning. I gleefully booted it up, patting myself on the back, because, prior to fiddling with my old laptop, I backed everything up to the cloud, so I would have everything at my fingertips on the new machine. Or so I thought.

To my horror, I realized that, among other things, I did not export all my bookmarks in Chrome. Not a big deal under normal circumstances, but my Chrome bookmarks bar would give Barnes & Noble a run for its money. We are talking hundreds of bookmarks, neatly categorized and filed into dozens of folders. So, I made a desperate please to IT to see if, by any chance, when they received by battled and bruised laptop, if they could, by the grace of God, boot it up (if it would) and export my bookmarks. Silently, I cursed myself, but continued to try to set up my new “workstation” to resemble my old one.

However, nice as the new laptop appeared to be, things weren’t working in my favor: network connections were not installing, the connection was slow, and more than once I had to restart the machine, only to watch the “spinning wheel of death” each time, sometimes for an hour or more.

(Side note: throughout this process, I had never really used my iPad for work, or anything mildly productive, and was finding out what a god-send the magnetically-attaching keyboard was becoming. Still seemed weird to swipe the screen rather than use a mouse to move around, but I’m getting the hang of it.)

IT offered to send me yet another laptop, and mentioned, in passing, that they actually could boot up and run my mangled laptop just fine, and, recovered my glorious bookmarks. So, I asked them if, perhaps, they could finish the job I attempted to start on my old machine, install the RAM, update it to Windows 10, and send it back to me, I even make a joke about how I would buy some gold washi tape and perform a sort of ritualistic “kintsugi” on the crack on the bottom.

For those who have never heard of it, kintsugi is an ancient Japanese art of repairing broken items with a glue-like substance that contains traces of gold. Usually done to pottery, the art is meant to honor the piece, and celebrate the journey represented by the imperfections, rather than try to hide them.

And, what started as a sort of joke to celebrate the battle of my computer against the odds (the odds being that I pulverized it), the gesture has evolved into a strange symbolism for so many things that have been going on recently in my life; from learning of some bad rumors going on about me (stay tuned for THAT post), to my recent decision to stop dyeing my hair (you guessed it, another post coming soon) to revisiting just about everything I knew or thought about myself, as I charge into my 50’s (more future posts).

Upon reflection this ancient art means more to me than a simple “hey, that’s cool” learning moment, to be almost a symbol to all of us as we age: why do we so desperately try to hide the imperfections that life bestows on us (grey hair, sagging skin, wrinkles, etc)? Rather, why don’t we celebrate the beauty in these superficial “imperfections” as a symbol of the experiences and wisdom we have acquired in this linear journey through life?

So, I pose it to you, dear readers: will you try to hide your perceived “imperfections” or will you “kintsugi” them, and celebrate your accomplishments?

This blog is a long time in coming, but something I have wanted passionately to contribute to the universe.

I’m on the precipice of my 51st birthday, and I feel as though my attitude to life, to myself, and to others is undergoing a metamorphosis. As if there is a wall of sound that surrounds me, and I need to chip away to create silence. A wall of:

• expectations from others
• former expectations from myself
• social norms and labels

I don’t mean to make this mysterious. It really isn’t. Maybe I’m simply getting older, rather than changing into something else. But this blog is an opportunity for me to get it down “on paper” (as it were), and to share it, as I feel I am not the only one feeling or thinking these things.

So, welcome. Pour a cup of tea (or coffee, or something stronger) and peruse the shelves for what resonated with you. And share. This is a no-judgement zone.

Be yourself; Everyone else is already taken.

— Oscar Wilde.