Over the weekend my old PC, the one I used for years without incident, succumbed to a virus of some sort. After I got my MacBook, the PC was handed off to my husband and kids, and it appears that one of the kids (who I’ll call “Blue Eyes”…) clicked something he shouldn’t have clicked. There wasn’t a full-time antivirus running, and that, of course, was a mistake.
After many attempts at salvage there was nothing left to do but reformat the main hard drive and reinstall Windows. Fortunately most of the data (including Pat’s very extensive collection of Beatles boots) was on a separate drive, and at least half of that had been backed up to an external drive as well. And since we’d just moved most of the kids files from an older PC to this one, the backup CDs they used were still lying around. So nothing major was lost.
Yesterday I spent the morning setting up desktops for the kids and reinstalling software. There’s something so cool about starting over like that. Wiping it all clean and making a fresh start.
I’ve been thinking about fresh starts lately. I have a history of starting new projects but not completing them, leaving remnants lying around. I always think I’ll get back to them someday, but I never do.
Never.
I need to rethink my thinking, I think. I’m slowly realizing that I’m not going to do all things I want to do in this life, and that’s ok. I’m a notoriously slow decision maker- I like to keep all my options open for as long as possible. But sometimes making a decision, making a choice, is what’s necessary to move ahead. And if making that decision means that you’re closing the door on something else, that isn’t necessarily a negative.
Logically the first step is to prioritize, then immediately follow up by getting to work on whatever project/idea is at the top of that list. But that doesn’t work for me. Instead maybe I just need to reach into the middle of the pile and whatever I pull out is what I do till it’s done. The fact that I have such a hard time with the “till it’s done” part is what’s frustrating, though. Maybe it’s that I’m only accountable to myself (and the occasional client.) But that doesn’t make it ok.
And sitting here writing long-winded blog posts on the subject might not be the best next step. But it feels good anyway.
