November 9, 2018

That’s the day my computer was reborn. Sounds like a good thing, doesn’t it? Well it wasn’t. The reason my computer was reborn is because it was wiped clean.

For the last few months, my trusty laptop which I purchased in 2013, and upon which I store all my documents, emails, etc., had been having issues. Blue Screen of Death. Unable to install the latest Windows updates. Slowness. The usual symptoms of digital ill-health.

I had month-old back-ups of important files, so when my PC decided it was no longer going to boot, it was with relative comfort that I set about trying to fix the problem. It would be a real bummer to lose the most recent files I had created, not to mention the thousands of emails I had on my hard drive. But if I couldn’t get the drive to boot, I could at least hook it to my PC and salvage that stuff.

That was the theory.

In practice, my drive was not responsive to all the software fixes and Master Boot File repairs I tried. And when I took out the drive and hooked it to another computer to read it, I discovered the partitioning was screwed up. In short, the drive was unreadable. Whether this happened as a result of something I did, or whether it was the result of the same fault that corrupted my hard drive in the first place, I don’t know. It’s a moot point. The fact was, the hard drive was good for nothing but formatting. Rebirth.

Thankfully, I still had all my most important documents. But I lost files that I would rather not have lost. And I lost my entire archive of emails. Messages from friends, family members, agents, editors, work–over ten years of correspondence gone.

But I learned two important lessons. First, you can still get Windows 10 for free if you have a Product Key from a previous version of Windows (7 or 8).

The second lesson was far more important: no-one died. That is to say, while I lost a lot of data that hurt me to lose, I’m still here. God is still on His throne. My family is still here. I can let go of what I lost, and it doesn’t matter. That’s a really, really important lesson to learn. And it’s one I’m trying to reconcile myself to the older I get. There are few things in this world worth holding on to tenaciously. Few things worth shedding a tear over if they’re lost. And none of them sit on the hard drive of my computer.

The Great Hard Drive Crash of 2018 was one of the worst thing that happened to me personally this year. And when I look around the world right now, at people suffering loss from flooding, fires, warfare, and the general fallen state of the world, I can’t complain. Not at all. Indeed, I’m grateful for the reminder of what’s really important. The value of letting go.