Got diverted into backing up old emails to-day. This is miles away from what I'd intended to do however I'll be ever so grateful should Outlook crash or some other disaster strike in the future. There has always been that question in my mind. "Do I need to, should I, file emails"? Filing however is in my blood, injected at an early age.
In the days when we typist made carbon copies, sometimes up to four of them at a time, we would be filing mad. Or was it go made filing! Office work, making those carbon copies, correcting them, was a craft. Yes and now I think about it there was the use of the eraser, to rub out letters. That was before 'white out'. You had to rub, not too hard not to soft, almost scrub at the paper. What a life! Filing all of those copies. The contortions to reach up, down, around or even between the drawers of the filing cabinet. Trying to make sense of where to put letters. Hoping and praying you'd be able to find them again.
My laptop arrived soon after the Head of the Order died, May 2003. I still have emails sent from that time, scattered about Outlook. Filing has been low on my priory list, as if I had one. However I have 'backed up' from time to time, but that I knew where they were.
Today I did a proper job because in a months time I'll be handing on this laptop. I really do not want to transfer every single message ever written onto that clean new hard drive. So I've dead filed my sent messages into years-worth bundles and put them in a folder, 'Sentemails'. Zipped them, password protected them, sent them up onto the internet and copied them onto a CD. Copied my .pst Back-up file, password protected it, zipped it, sent it, copied it. The state of Outlook is not perfect, yet better than it was this morning. There's always maintenance work on filing systems but at least I'm not battling with stuck filing draws, or wading through eraser dust.
I had to smile. All through the day I bumped into the file name Sentemails, and I unfailingly saw sentimental! No, not filing for that reason more perhaps out of habit and a touch of natural pride. I love to gaze at a row of files, colour coded, nestling in their drawer. Seeing icons rowed up neatly on the screen isn't quite the same yet a whole lot lighter, cleaner, brighter than those metal monsters of my early days.
We have a blessing verse, it goes like this:
We live in the world,
As if in the sky.
As lotus blossoms
Above unclean water.
Pure and beyond the world,
Is the mind of the trainee.
Oh Holy Buddha,
We take Refuge in Thee.
Helpful to remember lest one gets over involved in the refuge of attempting to create order out of email chaos. Oh, and it is always so interesting to look up the meaning of words...
Chaos. (Greek mythology) the most ancient of gods; the personification of the infinity of space preceding creation of the universe.
We teach in Buddhism that the creation of the universe started with the first stirring of the discriminatory mind.
