You may remember that several months ago I got a new computer and blogged about Letting Go of the Familiar. At that time I put off cleaning up the convoluted way my files were organized thinking I had enough to do just to learn Windows 7 and Microsoft 10. The day of reckoning came, however, when I couldn’t find the right location to load PDFs onto my website. I finally needed to deal with this.

The specifics are way too complicated to go into now. Suffice it to say that I contacted tech support twice and spent a total of 3½ hours on hold and talking to various tech support people. One of the solutions involved copying all my files to a different place on my computer. I didn’t want to do a global replace since I wasn’t sure it would save my most recent file. This means I now have over 4,000 duplicate documents, all with a cute little “(2)” designating the duplicate. I’ve started the painstaking task of deleting all the duplicates but I have to visually check any document created in the last four months to make sure I save the most recent one.

For awhile I stewed about this time consuming task and my irritation was increasing. It even distracted me from morning prayer. This was good, because I started to pray my gratitude prayer and focus on reality.

  • This is going to take time, but computers also save me time.
  • This is not a life and death situation and my fretting about it will not change anything.
  • It is good that there are people and services like free tech support that patiently helped me through the conversion (despite the decision to copy every document).
  • When I hear on the news about the starving people in Somalia, people near me with life-threatening illnesses, the unemployed desperately seeking work to feed their families, and all the other real problems of those near and far, this pales as a problem.

So, just as I have to let go of duplicate material goods, I’m now letting go of duplicate words and the time it takes to do it. Sometimes getting rid of stuff consumes a lot of time.