I write therefore I am
(words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, stories, ideas)

This is one of those posts that actually started being written whilst cycling home. It was three in the morning (eleven hours ago...), it was cold, snow everywhere and I was coming home from work, feeling tired. Not mind-tired but muscle-tired. Just enough to make the prospect of getting home and cuddling on my sheets in the silence something to look for.

Yesterday was a tough day. Like most have been for the last couple of months, even three months now. The long and short of it was that, roughly two weeks ago, right after finishing NaNoWriMo, and as I was backing up ALL my stuff, the IT nightmare took place - I lost it all.

As it stands I don't know if I truly have lost ten years worth of stories and audio tracks but, I can't get access to any of it.
And I have to wait until I can get a chance to go to some people that might be able to help.

During the last two weeks I've been trying very hard to accept this and move on - but I simply can't. I can't write, I just keep thinking the same spiraling thoughts over and over. I know. It's a bit ridiculous to be so attached to information, something that, ultimately, is empty (as Buddhists say), but what can I do? Brains and the minds therein are strange inhabitants of our existence.

I have had quite a few insights in relation to this situation. Some are pretty obvious ones. Some less so. But, as far as they've come, they haven't actually changed my inner world of doom and gloom. I feel I'm on emotional stasis.
Even though my mind continues to search for answers amidst its files, creating more and more connections, I'm trying not to read too much into it, especially when it comes up with some pretty weird scenarios about the meaning of it all. I don't know if any of this was meant. I don't know if this is for the best. If this is a test. If it's all just random. If I should change direction and focus in my life. If this is the ultimate proof of artistic survival. what I do know is that all these things reveal fears and expectations...

One of the things I was thinking about last night was how this emotional wear and tear could serve as some sort of preparation to my upcoming meditation retreat (if I get there, since I'm having problems with my visa as well - that's what it's been feeling, problems all around... there's very little in my life right now that seems to offer a place of rest and peace - and that makes my feeling of isolation become overwhelming at times). Like this turmoil to be experienced and accepted right now would enable me to move deeper into meditation during the retreat. Or maybe it's a reverse echo of sorts, a kind of prequel for what's to come.
I'm sure that these things are true if I do get there and the retreat goes anywhere near where it did last year - and, from what I've gathered inside and with one of the monks, it's bound to.

Death is the final frontier.

Yesterday I also considered the very simple scenario of looking back on all of this from the vantage point of old age. Would it be still the drama I experience now?

If I do lose the data I think I'll remember this event when I'm older.
But if I don't, I'll probably forget. Lessons learned with pain (or, rather, with intensity) tend to stick around much longer.

Have I learned my lesson in regards to backing up stuff?
Not really. I was backing up the data and created an accident. And I know myself too well to believe I'm going to change my natural clumsiness in the next hundred years or so. More than anything I have to learn to live with it...

In any case, the whole point of what I'm writing here is simply to share how deep the impact of creating patterns inside one's mind can be.
Obviously I cannot know any other minds besides mine - at least, not in the same way and, I would venture, as profoundly. But it seems to me that minds do tend to behave alike since their raw materials and modus operandi are somewhat similar. Minds create patterns like one might create a trail in a forest. The more that trail is used, the more the effort one puts into opening it (consciously, willingly, or not) the longer it is likely to stay open, the deeper and wider the groove made on the soil.

And, with pain, we open not trails but highways in our brains. We map out scenarios that we wish to avoid but, at the same time, are extremely aware of (one implies the other, after all).
And this is what I've been doing. Grooves upon grooves, upon grooves. My neurons are heavily interlaced in some very specific patterns. So much so that part of me doesn't even want to get away from the patterns they represent. They are well known and, to an extend, safe. And, if we're safe, why should we change?

All this to say that my mind has been reeling and battling with itself in trying to come up with a solution for something that it has created but that it cannot solve. That is perhaps the core drama of the human life. We are here and yet we do not KNOW.

Perhaps we just need to accept that.

Somehow.

peace.