Personal Disasters
Entry posted by caldrail
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Todays post on my blog is something of an obituary. My computer, a veteran of many hardware changes, has finally succumbed to a nasty virus and expired yesterday aged nine.
One point of view is that it's merely a machine, one that can - eventually - be replaced. Up to a point that's correct, assuming you can afford one that is equally reliable and capable over just short of a decade of hard use. The issue isn't the hardware however, but the software collected on it's hard drive. Over the course of nine years you collect files that become important to you. More than that, I have projects on that hard disk going back eight years, and even with the many backups I've made, reassem,bling the jigsaw is going to be a long job and pieces will be missing.
I can imagine some people will be already muttering "Ahh diddums" and dismissing my own personal disaster as inconsequential compared to their own petty dramas. I have no choice but to regard that attitude as one displayed by petty people. Look at it like this. I've seen many natural disasters reported on television and for me, the result is always a two dimensional image of something I haven't experienced. I can sympathise with the victims of course, even offer a tiny donation to help if I feel so moved, but I'm comfortable in my own little world just like everyone else. My recent loss might not be quite on that sort of scale, but I do now have some appreciation of what the loss feels like.
Ah but there's no comparison is there? Between the loss of loved ones and the homes they lived in, to the final gasp of consumer electronics. In a sense, there is. My work on the PC is essentially creative, apart from an occaisional game or episode of Star Trek to ease the boredom. Creative work is something to admire (or perhaps criticise) when it's finshed and on public display. Music, art, lierature - in a small way I have contributed such things to the public arena and had others bubbling in my semiconductor driven cauldron. These things don't always happen magically on the spur of the moment. All to often, it takes hours of work to approach the end you're trying for, and more hours of work when you fail to achieve it and begin again. It might even take years in some cases, and for me, that's a familiar obstacle to the ends I've sought.
When your work is taken away by circumstance there's an emptiness inside you. It's a difficult void to fill. The inspiration you had to begin with might not be there any more. It's been my experience that the second attempt is never as fresh as the first. Starting again from scratch not only requires something of the original conception, inspiration, and desire, but also the discipline to wearily tread the same old path.
To those who sneer at what I've written, to those malicious characters who've set out to destroy my work, I simply smile and remind myself that they've proven me a better man.
Inspiration of the Week
There was a guy on these forums some time ago who suffered a similar loss to mine, probably even a worse one. I offered a poem by Rudyard Kipling, written around the turn of the 19th/20th centuries, and still as applicable today.
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream -- and not make dreams your master;
If you can think -- and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings -- nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run --
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And -- which is more -- you'll be a Man, my son!
Well, perhaps I did breathe a word about my loss. Such is the modern world, where the internet has become something of a global meeting place and a venue for painting portraits of our otherwise insignificant lives. But then again, if it helps someone else cope with their own loss and 'petty drama', surely that is something good to come from it?
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