Where is My Mind?

Hello Friends,

As I sat down to write this week's newsletter, I paused (a much more poetic word than procrastinated) to check my email. My email is an essential part of my life. It's a to do list, an event calendar, and a personal archive. The email program I use is Gmail.

Like most of you who use Gmail, my inbox is organized with tabs: Primary, Promotions, Social, and Updates. By far, my most active tab is Updates. This is where all my subscriptions, general comments, and contextual notes land. It's pretty much my active inbox—way more than the Primary tab.

The other tabs are junk drawers. I continuously delete all the emails in Promotions and Social when they appear, usually without even looking at them. New things and phish land in Primary. If the message is timely, like a notice about an impending package, I'll keep it in the Primary tab, deleting it as soon as the item is delivered. If I deem a correspondence relevant, I move it to Updates, where it becomes part of my life story.

Basically, I live in Updates. If you were to peruse my Gmail Updates tab, you'd get a solid sense of how I spend my days—calendar reminders, newsletters I want to read a little deeper, a link to a funny cat picture, an email about getting free woodchips from a tree maintenance company.

Basically, the emails in the Updates tab are what I consider essential.

Well, while I was sitting down to write this newsletter, I decided to check my email (as stated previously, procrastinate): delete the usual flotsam in the Promotions and Social tabs, inspect the Primary tab for new action items, and ground myself by reviewing the Updates tab.

Except, I screwed up.

Thinking I was in the Promotions tab, I deleted all of my emails in Updates. I only realized this after I did a few other things and dropped into the actual Promotion tab and discovered it was full of crap.

The entire content of my Updates tab was absent.

Instead of my semi-organized life, a white, blank screen was staring back at me. I've done this before, and acting fast, I could immediately recover them before breaking into a sweat.

Not so, today. They were gone gone, a sacrifice to the entropy gods.

To get these emails back, I would have to slog through the thousands of emails in my Deleted folder in search of them, if I could even remember what they were. But the whole point of keeping these emails in my Updates tab specifically means I don't need to remember them—I quick glance and I recall who I am. Not to mention (I guess I'm mentioning) that some of the lost missives were quite old (the wood chip one was from two summers ago, and well, you never know when you need wood chips).

Rather than panic, I decided to let it ride.

I mean, it's just 1s and 0s, right? If it's important, they'll call back.

Lately, I have been following Oliver Berkman). He seems to suggest that since we have a limited time on this planet (he uses the term 4000 weeks), we should cut ourselves some slack and let go of trying to be perfect.

That resonates with me—not the part about our lives being only 4000 weeks long, but the thought that since our life is finite, we should relax and embrace our humanness. He even goes so far to suggest we can try failing stuff on purpose to get comfortable with the feeling of it.

So, here we go. With my empty Updates tab, I've inadvertently embraced the zero email inbox method.

As soon as I realized what happened, the oft quoted Masahide poem popped into my head:

Barn's burnt down --

now

I can see the moon.

One experiences a type of surreal pleasure in being forced to let go (or simply losing) something that you perceived as being invaluable.

Twice in my life, I've embarked on a move, sold everything, and packed my most cherished (at the time) belongings into my car. Only to have someone break into my car and steal those things—once in Seattle and once in Washington, DC.

Both occasions required a re-evaluation of stuff.

Psychologists have a term for this type of change of perspective: Cognitive Reappraisal.

The funny thing (at least I think it's funny) is that I was going to write this week's newsletter about an article I read that proposes (scientifically, of course) that our minds go blank about 20% of the time. You know, that awkward moment when you're about to present the secret to the universe and it slips off the tip of your tongue only to leave you struck, mouth open, and sometimes in a panic.

Well, it happens to all of us, and it's just how we're wired.

I find an immense comfort in this thought. I mean, what better way to help your mind go blank than to delete all your emails (and not try to recover them)?

Rather than deride ourselves during these common and momentary lapses, we should embrace them as proof that our brains are functioning at an optimum level.

How's that for a cognitive reappraisal?

Of course, you could always send me comments, share this newsletter, or buy my books—that would refill my inbox in no time.

Happy reading, happy writing, happy… umm… letting go,

David