Category: metaphor

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Tackling… a Metaphor

Today Backup and Sync tells me that it can’t sync 7107 items, but it is syncing 7130 of 18221. Or something like that. The numbers change every time I look. But I think this is a good thing, because yesterday it couldn’t sync 20837, which I think means that the numbers of files it wants to sync has gone down, and I take that to mean that some of the files which were formerly on the google drive are no longer there – so my deletions have achieved something. But, the space is still full. Is this because of what’s being uploaded from my phone?

Why do I keep harping on about this? Because I’m sure there has to be a solution somewhere, somehow. It’s a problem I’ve ignored for a long time, but always assumed there was a simple solution. Now I’ve decided to try and resolve it, it’s turning out to be a lot more challenging than just deleting some old emails and photos.

I have just taken what feels like the nuclear option. I have disconnected my account from Backup and Sync. But is that really what I wanted to do? Does this mean that I can’t now access my files on Google Drive, even to delete them? What does that mean for my emails? And my photos? And sharing files between my PC and other devices?

I have written an awful lot of words on this topic (I’m guessing about 4,000, but I haven’t checked). It’s not the only thing going on in my life at the moment – I can walk away at any time and forget about it for hours on end. But it feels symbolic. If the issue is about stuff lying around on my electronic ‘desktop’, isn’t that very similar to the state of my physical desktop, my study, my whole house? Things which have just been left to lie where they are, no real system of filing or tidying away, just overwhelming clutter? And what about my mental state – isn’t it all a perfect metaphor for that too?

I have been ignoring the messages relating to my emails for years, with only occasional bursts of enthusiasm for going through and deleting them when the warnings become too dire. My old Yahoo email currently has 7,526 unread emails – that’s right, unread, not undeleted. But taking yesterday as a typical example, I received 12 new ones, of which two, relating to an online order for cat food, are of significance. What about the rest? None of them are actually malicious or a nuisance (unless there were others that got sent directly into the spam folder), they’re mostly from companies I have accounts with or organisations that send out newsletters I don’t want to unsubscribe from because you never know when there might be something that I’m interested in. There’s even one from someone who wants to tell me how to stop procrastinating – I might unsubscribe from that if I ever get round to it.

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Round Like a Circle in a Spiral

I wrote yesterday, nothing much, and when I got close to the end I wanted to include a quote from Polar Express (which I saw for the first/only time at my daughter’s last Christmas). I only remembered it because I read it somewhere recently, in a file that I’d obviously saved it to because I found it interesting. I thought I remembered reading it on my laptop, so guessed it was one of the Word files that I wanted to save in none-365 format. Just been looking for it, in all the places I could think of that it might be – I even thought I might have saved it on my phone, but no luck. Came on the PC to start writing, Googled ‘Polar Express quotes’, opened the third link down, and it was the second quote on the list:

‘One thing about trains: It doesn’t matter where they’re going. What matters is deciding to get on.’

The Polar Express

But the question is – given that the only reason I didn’t post what I wrote yesterday (apart from it being the usual pointless drivel) was because I wanted to find that quote, then I got caught up in doing something else and never got back to it – should I post that now or not? Should I do that instead of trying to write something today? Except… I’m almost half way to 500 words already.

What I write is throw-away, but sometimes, reading back through old posts, I find something interesting. Like that quote – okay, it’s not exactly Schopenhauer, but it’s interesting, right? In looking for it, I also found another quote that I thought was interesting, which I’d taken from a strange documentary about Jim Carrey that I watched last Boxing Day – but I’m not going to quote that now because it’s on the laptop, which is downstairs in the front room and I’m upstairs on the PC.

When things become self-referential, they create a sort of spiral effect, or maybe a hall of mirrors, to use a familiar metaphor I’ve often used before – and there I go again. But does it just take me up my own back passage, or somewhere different? Because a spiral (I used that word deliberately) is not a circle – it doesn’t take you back to exactly the same place as before – something has changed, it might be infinitesimal, but the circumstances, the conditions are not identical. Back to cause and effect again, and the Buddhist idea of ‘conditionality’, the connectedness of all things. Which set me off looking up definitions, and led me to a book I might buy.

I feel as though I’ve strayed away from the point somehow, but then, I can’t remember what point I was trying to make. So that’s kind of a good thing, I think: it doesn’t matter so much where the train is going, what matters is that I got on.

I’ve completed nine cards so far, and printed five letters which are now in envelopes ready to be posted.  

Round, like a circle in a spiral…