}

Wednesday, January 10, 2018

Endured


Auckland emerged from the storm in one piece, and so did we. However, by the time the storm passed, I was already getting sick. Saturday evening I finally wandered out to look at the damage (photo above), but that was hard work. Now, I’m recovering, too. With a bonus epiphany.

The caption on the photo pretty much explains what I saw, but I was in no condition to do anything about it. We fixed the damage yesterday.

Meanwhile, on Sunday I felt awful. I don’t think I got out of my chair all day. However, I suddenly felt fine later that evening—the first time all year. Actually, it was the first time since late last year that I felt totally fine (we’ve previously established that I make that sort of New Year joke, but this has been my only opportunity this year; I wasn’t going to miss it).

I woke up during the night feeling yucky, so I took a couple paracetamol. When I got up a couple hours later, I felt okay again. I was fine until afternoon, when I felt yucky again, and popped a couple paracetamol again. Yesterday and today I’ve felt basically okay.

This has meant I just didn’t feel up to doing all the physical work I’d planned for my office project, so, as I said in my previous post, I did what I could. That meant sitting quietly on the floor sorting through all the unfiled receipts and statements I’d had boxed up, sometimes for years. Progress was slow, but steady.

In the process I came up with a solution. I took small plastic lidded bins I’d just emptied, and started putting the sorted papers in year older, the oldest on top. Each January 1, I discard everything that’s more than seven years old (so, anything from 2010 or earlier can go; one year from now, 2011 can go, and so on). This way I need three of the plastic boxes plus one small one for last year.

As I did this, I had an epiphany when I realised this will be the last time I’ll ever have such a huge job to do, and not because of a sudden change of behaviour to be thoroughly organised: We don’t get bills or statements in the mail anymore, so there will be very little to file. In fact, the current year’s file is just a plastic sorting folder, something I’ll never fill up during the year.

This also means I no longer need the filing cabinet where I filed bills and statements as they came in, but the bigger story there is that I’ll never have to sit and file receipts again—easily the houseold job I despise most of all and put off endlessly. Instead, I can take each folder, distribute the contents to the appropriate year’s box, and then the drawer will be empty. I DO have archival stuff, mostly samples of things I’ve done, that I want to keep, and the filing cabinet will be good for that, I think.

All of this has happened because nearly all our statements and bills are now online. I keep them on my computer, but if there’s a disaster and I lose them I can just download them again. This is one way win which this digitial age has made my life so much better.

And I probably realised all of this because I was sick. If I’d been 100%, I’d have just moved everything out of my office so I could reorganise it, but since I couldn’t do that, I decided to sort and purge stuff to be filed, and that gave me time to realise the fuller implications of what I was doing right then—and in the future. Sometimes being sick isn’t all bad.

In any case, I’m doing better. So is everyone else, too: The sun is shining here today.

1 comment:

rogerogreen said...

epiphany on (or at least near) Epiphany!