I was writing about ‘Impossible is Not Nothing’ yesterday. I had written more than 1000 words and edited and re-edited.
However, when I tried to publish it, something went wrong. And the post was lost. Maybe I had problem with the internet connection and nothing was saved.
I felt frustrated. Didn’t want to write anything. Freaked out a lot and thought I’d never write again. It was very heart breaking. All those words and sentence that I had constructed were gone forever.
Even if I felt very bad, I had to write again. And I knew it wouldn’t be as good as the previous one. Anyway, I wrote it and also posted it. It wasn’t 10% as nice as the previous post.
Instead of feeling bad about the loss, I tried to reconcile myself by thinking that it’s a chance to contemplate that nothing belong to me.
According to Leo, the frustration and fear means we’re holding onto something:
Notice what you’re holding onto. If your response is fear, it’s because you’re holding onto something. It’s probably a fantasy/ideal, or wanting to control something, wanting something to turn out a certain way, wishing things would meet the expectations you have. If you’re saying, “He should do this” or “It should be like this” then you’re holding onto an ideal/expectation/outcome.
As Leo explains, those words didn’t belong to me. They weren’t mine, and they never will. I was just holding onto my post thinking it belongs to me.
Everything in this world is temporary — it’s just for rent. Instead of bitching over the internet and my carelessness, I tried to embrace it and learn the art of letting go. It was difficult, of course.
It also made me realize about how we tackle life everyday. We hold on to everything as if they’ll be with us forever, or that they’ll belong to us forever.
But the truth is, nothing in this world belongs to you. You’re here for a short period of time, and when you die, everything again belongs to the earth.
Importance of backing up: Even if I tried to practice the art of letting go, I wasn’t very happy that I lost my post. So, I’m starting to take it very seriously. Losing my files was entirely my fault. If I took precautions about it before, I wouldn’t have lost that post. It was carelessness from my side. So, I think it’s a lesson for me to backup everything seriously.
If bad things don’t occur from time to time, we won’t be prepared for the future accidents. So, instead of freaking out, it’s better to let go and learn from it.
Yes, I’ve learned the long and hard way the importance of backing up. 🙂 I’m constantly pressing
Cmd+A Cmd+Cwhen I’m typing things, especially when I’m typing things online in text boxes like this comment form, where something may happen and I might lose all this text. If I do lose it, I can simply pressCmd+Vand paste it back in. (Also, if you’re on a Mac, the CopyClip tool is fantastic. It saves a history of all your copy’s so that you can go back and retrieve them if you need to.)On the title of this post: I wrote a post with the exact same title a few years ago!
Presses
Cmd+A Cmd+C.In fact, I was writing on the WordPress Visual Editor. I like writing on the visual editor because I can see exactly how it turns out when I post it. You’ve done a great job of making the texts in visual editor look exactly like in the post when it’s published.
Now, I keep pressing
Cmd+A Cmd+Cwhen I’m typing in visual editor and click on Save as draft every now and then. I really don’t like to use other text editor to write on my WordPress blog.I’m on Mac and I’ve been using Jumpcut and I think it’s better than CopyClip. I just downloaded CopyClip and figured out it doesn’t have hot keys. If I’ll have to click the button at the menubar every time then it’ll take lots of time for me to copy paste something.
With Jumpcut, I can do that quickly with hot keys.
Loved your post about Letting Go, thanks for sharing. I realized that you have ‘YEAR’ in
raamdev.com/2011/let-go. I think that’s better because we might have same title later as well. But, I didn’t keep it because I thought it might hamper SEO. And also because I like to keep my URL minimal.What do you think about that(permalink structure)? Is it good idea to use the YEAR or leave it as it is.
Welcome to MAC manish :). Backing up data is very important something bad can happen and all the data can be lost, even in agricultural startup’s where there is less need of a laptop I make sure to copy notes to my hard disk from pages.