The Re-Building Phase

I lost everything on my work laptop's hard drive-so much for hope. All my email is gone. All of those spreadsheets are gone. All my automation scripts, gone. No more bookmarks, no backups of files that I left on the local hard drive, no more pics, no more music, IT IS ALL GONE.

But it isn't all irreplaceable or a critical loss. Life will go on, even my work life. I will still get emails in the future. I can re-create spreadsheets-maybe even better than before or see if I emailed a copy to someone else. The automation can be re-written-although not automatically. I can find all of those websites again. I can take more pics and steal more music.

I would like to say that I have learned from my mistakes! I will find some nifty program that will automatically back up my email .pst file. I will back up all of the documents in My documents folder. I will print out pictures and burn music onto CDs.

But what is reality? Reality is loss. Reality is pain. Reality hurts. OK, so that may be a bit dramatic, but no matter what I do I can't protect everything from everything.

So what? Well, thank goodness for second chances. Monday is over and Tuesday is here. IT Guy will hand-deliver my "new" laptop any minute now. I'll spend the next couple of days tweaking, installing and setting things just right. Then I'll get all of that backup stuff in place. Then I'll start working on all of those things that I lost.

Thus marks the beginning of my re-building phase.

Here it comes again: The Great Cosmic Truth:

Life is full of second chances. Forgiveness is a wonderful thing. Grace is a wonderful thing. This Easter season can be one where the old passes away and the new person is re-born. It isn't easy giving birth...Just ask my wife who had baby boy #4 just a couple of months ago (no girls). It also isn't easy re-building and changing for the better.

Is it worth it? Well, I don't know yet. I know I can't go back. There is nothing to go back to. So I have to move forward. I don't have to learn anything new or do things differently. But I can't remember everything that I lost...Or it wouldn't be that big of a loss. I don't remember how everything worked or was worded or organized or whatever. So I am going to have to do some things differently. Hopefully I will do them better as well.

Change is good. Growing is hard.

-Durk-