Cleaning House

One of the benefits of having your computer take a crap on you is that in many ways you get to start over.  Most of my life exists in digital format at this point.  I back up the important stuff.  i lost some unimportant stuff, and the process of reloading files from the backup gave me the opportunity to sort out shat should stay and what should go, in addition to creating better organization.  I start off with good intentions, but after a while all my new files tend to just get chucked in a couple of places.

In short, my digital world looks largely my my physical world.  I am not a neat freak, but periodically I go through my stuff, reorganize, and throw out the unneeded.  The fact that my husband does not is one of my great pet peeves, not just because it clutters up the house with things he hasn't used in 10 years, but because of the sense of being overly anchored to the past, accumulating nothing but burden which you have to drag forward indefinitely.

Periodically, we need to let go.  Not everything, of course.  There are important things in our past, good or bad, that should continue to be embraced.  But one of the things I did, for example, was trash a pile of old emails from a gaming group I have long ago left for the very reasons shown in the emails: disrespect, cattiness, two-facedness, favortism, etc.  For a long while I kept everything just in case I needed to produce evidence of what was going on.  But let's face it: no one is going to revisit it two years later, and I don't even want to.  Just reading those emails is stressful.  So most of them went into the trash.

It's practical in that it makes my email account easier to sort, but there's also a psychological benefit.  I'm accepting that I am past it.  Those materials no longer matter to me, which is why they are being junked.  I'm moving on.  They are no longer baggage.

So I'm actually kind of enjoying this cleaning phase in the wake of the computer crash.  I can re-prioritize, and put those projects somewhere I can actually find them.