It's been a rough few weeks. In late September I accidentally spilled a bottle of water on my laptop's keyboard and watched in horror as my computer died in front of me. I powered down, tried a million remedies to dry out the chassis, but the hard drive had fried, and no matter who looked at it, all my data was gone. No one could salvage it. 5 years of my life gone in an instant, and tons of work down the drain, never to be recovered. It's five weeks later and I'm just now digging myself out of the giant hole I dug for myself, finishing job assignments that should've been completed a month ago... I didn't have a back-up, and I lost a lot of unique things that are irreplaceable. Original document templates, photographs from a dozen countries, videos of my 9-week old puppy staring into a mirror for the first time, work projects that took years to finish, elements I designed for my wedding, and every playlist I've used for a DJ set in the last five years... All gone in an instant... There's a profound lesson here somewhere, but I'm not sure what it is...
When we moved to Thailand, Becky and I made a conscious effort to practice non-attachment, which is called
Aparigraha in Sanskrit and is one of central yamas stressed in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, one of the many books we use to guide our lives. I've struggled for a long time with Aparigraha, because collecting vast quantities of music is necessary for a DJ, and anyone who's ever seen the multiple man-caves I've lived in could tell you, I've always been surrounded by copious quantities of media. I'm not a hoarder, by any means, but I have a fondness for books, DVDs, and records, and have spent the last 12 years as a professional librarian of sorts in my day job as well... The things is, I thought I'd gotten a pretty good handle on this issue, having liquidated almost all my worldly possessions in the three month run-up to our departure from Chicago. Sold a couple hundred life-changing books, dispensed with a few trusty instruments, emptied my closet, and had a fire-sale of my record collection where I parted with 2000+ albums in a few weeks. It hurt, but it also felt hugely liberating. I even loaded my turntable coffin into the back of some stranger's truck, and watched him drive off, leaving me with a fistful of dirty hundred dollar bills and a pervasive feeling of regret: I sold my most prized possession to the first guy who answered my ad on Craigslist. Watching some random meth-head with rotting teeth and needle tracks up his arms drive away with my turntables & mixer was a hard lesson in non-attachment. Sometimes you just have to let things go, no matter how invested in them you are, no matter how much they've shaped your life. And yet here I am, just over a year later, tearing my hair out over the loss of my hard drive, and the erasing of a vast swath of my recent memory... Attachment, it turns out, runs deeper than just getting rid of your physical possessions...
I've spent the last month realizing how utterly dependent I am on my laptop. I can't do my job without it, and as someone who works from home, my computer is my primary link to my offices in Bangkok, Singapore, and Chicago. I can't get anything done without it, and it's quite humbling to find yourself paralyzed because your tools are suddenly unavailable. But really, there's only one option, which is to start over. Get a new computer. Install the latest operating system. Build better templates. Scrap the old ways of working and replace them with a leaner, more efficient system. And so I write this on a shiny new MacBook Pro my office has kindly given me (I was due for a replacement this month anyway), and I'm looking forward, thinking about fresh canvasses to deface and different approaches to old problems. I've been forced to evolve, because everything that got me to this point is suddenly gone. The work is gone but I have the skills to do it all over... I suppose this is actually a pretty nifty metaphor for this new life I'm living in Thailand. I am no longer a DJ, no longer a musician seeking peers & paying gigs, no longer an angry malcontent raging at the idiocies of the US government, no longer surrounded by artists and bohemians and plotting out new ways to express myself. I am no longer living a reactive life, no longer circumscribed by the limitations of my tools, no longer hemmed in by old ways of seeing and the accumulated detritus of an old identity. Who I am is whoever I want to be, and whatever I want to build. And that's once again hugely liberating. Or maybe I'm just trying to wrap a shiny bow around the absolutely craptastic reality that I just lost 500 GB of my best work, and a decade's worth of labor. When years of your life disappear into a digital void, it's time to start reinventing yourself... Letting go gets easier once you stop looking back at the places you've been, and start gazing at the gorgeous horizon in front of you. I'm going to keep reminding myself of this as I start from square one all over again.
