It’s evening meditation time. It’s interesting how we can come to think of pretty much anything as normal, if it’s what keeps going on in our life. Bob and I were on vacation last week and the entire first day my server was down, so I was fixing it via wifi on the ship. I think of that as normal – I spent a full day on my Ukraine family vacation repairing a hacked forum. I spent a full day on our last vacation fixing server issues. It’s just a part of life.
When we got back, we were only home for a few hours before the power went out, zapping electronics. Again, that is just what happens. I fired up the flashslights and we fixed things when we could.
A gutter seems to have detached from the house. Hmmm. Time to find a gutter repair person. My car began bucking on the highway. Add some gas cleaner and hope that clears it up.
None of those really mattered because right before vacation I had to disconnect from the anti-spam service I’d been using for the past 15 years, as they were shutting down. And I instantly became deluged with hundreds upon hundreds of spam messages every day. I can barely weed through them to get to my real mail, and real mail is getting lost. This was an extra pain on the ship where mail download was slow to begin with. It was taking an hour a day just to get mail down. This wreaked havoc for a number of projects I was working on.
One person I was writing for got upset with the delays and moved on to work with someone else. I wholly understand that – she needs her writing done right now and I’m tackling the task of repairing the mail servers. What made me think, though, was that she found the things I was dealing with unusual. As if these were outliers in the life of a small businessperson. Maybe it’s because I’ve been running websites since the late 1990s, but I think of this as wholly normal. Of course the server went down while I was on vacation. Servers have a sixth sense. Of course the spam server went away at the exact same time. Of course it took an hour plus to download mail daily. Of course the power outage fried and reset things. Of course the gutter then detached and my car thought about self-destructing. Aren’t these the things that happen?
And through it all, I think, I am so blessed. Bob and I are healthy. James and Amanda and my parents are all healthy. The pets are all healthy. We have ample food, a cozy house, and I am doing things I love. I can fix servers and spam and all the rest. The things that really matter are all OK, and that fills me with joy.
I am so, so grateful that these problems we face are, in the grand scheme of things, minor and temporary.
Namaste.