Yesterday, I created inspirational artwork and prepared planning notes for July’s Ariyawen retreat. Artwork complete and displayed onsite, I returned to put final touches on my notes. Unfortunately, I discovered that I’d somehow deleted them. I don’t remember closing the unsaved document, but it was gone, along with several hours of hard work.
A few minutes later, I found my Ariyawen wiki journal blank. The whole thing had been mysteriously erased, and a quick search revealed no backup. Months worth of entries were gone – poof! – into the ether.
Dismay and distress are reasonable responses, because I can’t recreate the journal entries. Those thoughts and feelings are forever gone, products of the moment in which they were born. I can recreate my planning notes, but that will take several hours of additional effort.
But before I could respond with negative, though understandable, emotions, a thought, gentle as moth wing, fluttered through my mind – what other response might I authentically have? My negative response, ready to swoop, stopped short. Rather than gearing up for a major pout-bout, I found myself calm and bemused.
What other response MIGHT I authentically have?
Well, the retreat notes were just initial ideas; a second time through might yield better results. But if I still had the first version, I probably wouldn’t take the time to rethink it all. So, perhaps their disappearance is a blessing, because it frees me to enjoy that initial creative stage again, this time with more forethought.
My journal? Well, I often repost my thoughts from the Ariyawen website into my journal, so much of what disappeared still exists elsewhere. The rest were thoughts and feelings of the moment, important in their time, but probably not eternally memorable.
So it turns out, there’s no reason to brew up a storm. I don’t have a disaster, I have clear skies – cloudless and fresh. My words are free to fly.
Ariyawen 