Something that is truly frustrating is when you work hard to put information into your computer and somehow it crashes, or there is an error in backing up the information or somehow your writing gets wiped out! Just like that, in one second, all your hard work is gone!!
It happened to me. I wrote an entire storybook (it took me years) and then I stopped for a while, as I did not really have the ending figured out….well, sure enough my son came home for a few weeks and he always tries to “fix” my computer which never seems to be working up to par. This time my husband decided I should take over the children’s laptop computer and give mine to the children….but in order to do that my son had to transfer the documents from my computer to the childrens and vice versa. He thought it went properly but somehow he was in a rush and forgot to verify it. Then he wiped out everything from both computers.
To my utter dismay, only part of the documents were transferred and the rest simply disappeared! I lost half my documents. I was devastated. Months, years of work…gone, Just like that.
Well, I knew it was a decree from Above so I tried to stay cool.
But I have since tried to figure out what I could learn from that.
There are a few profound lessons. We learn in Torah that G-d creates and sustains the world every second and if for one moment He would cease creating the world, the entire world would cease to exist. It would disappear, so to speak. The computer can really drive that idea home.
The second lesson I learned is how frustrating it is to work and lose all your work overnight!
The third lesson I learned is that life is very temporary and many of the so called “important” projects we work on really are not that important or of lasting value.
So what if I lost some documents? Was it the end of the world? Could I continue without it? Yes, I realized it was not as precious or necessary as I imagined….
Actually recently we lost many videos….beautiful family videos that were mistakenly thrown out by someone who was storing them for us. Now that hurt! But even there I realize it was meant to be somehow, and those videos also are not as important as I imagine. The main thing is what we do with our lives, how we live our lives, not so much how many pictures we take or how many videos we accumulate. The good deeds we do nobody can take away or throw away! Those last forever. I comfort myself thinking that people in previous generations did not have video machines and barely had pictures….it did not make a difference in terms of their piety, good deeds and the beautiful generations they raised. Videos and pictures are for our own egos, I suppose, to give ourselves encouragement, comfort and to serve as memories. But when you leave behind pure, righteous and good children, that is better than memories on a video!
And the fourth lesson I learned is to always make sure my computer is backed up properly!