This isn’t my typical type of post and I don’t normally post through the week, but today’s events have driven me to it. I arrived at work, expecting quite a chilled-out day since my boss is off. I’ve got the office all to myself and not much pressing work on. I had one important job, going over some terms and conditions with a director and then getting them signed off. I got this job sorted before 9 am and was ready to cruise through. I was even hoping to secretly get some work on my book done.
However, at around 9:15 am one of the directors came to me regarding a report I had created for them. The report was a year-on-year financial analysis of the entire company. It detailed the revenue of every customer, as well as which customers had fallen, risen, and completely stopped using us. He informed me that some of the data had been calculated incorrectly and I quickly spotted why. The naming convention of some of the accounts differed between the spreadsheets I had used to compare against one another. The directors had already been in talks with the board regarding this data and were soon to be distributing it to the entire company. So, I had to get on rectifying it as soon as possible.
I thought to myself, knowing it’d take around an hour or so to rectify, “Not to worry, I’ll get on it straight away and then I’ve got the rest of the day free.” The next couple of hours consisted of spreadsheets and formulas flying all over the place. But I got there by around 11:30 am. I double-checked all the data was correct, then phoned the sales director, who had initially informed me of my mistake, to come double-check it all looked correct this time around. He agreed to come check it out and informed me he’d be around 5-10 minutes. Just before he was about to come in, I thought to myself, “I’ll make a copy just in case this one gets lost or corrupted somehow”. Little did I know, the next few clicks, to copy, and then to paste, were to cause me a mountain of stress.
When I copied the Excel document and pasted it, the green bar filled its way up to 99%, and there it sat for around 5 minutes, before prompting me with an error message. I didn’t think much of it until I came to try to re-open the document. It was at this moment I realized my entire USB drive had corrupted. I couldn’t access anything on it, my computer wouldn’t even register its existence. I wasn’t too alarmed; I work in an IT-related field and have fixed problems like this for others before. However, long story short, I spent an hour on the phone with an IT support company and tried multiple solutions from online forums and YouTube videos, only to realize my USB is well and truly dead.
After spending this hour on the phone trying fix after fix, reality started to kick in. It wasn’t just that I had lost these work reports that the directors were in urgent need of. I’d also lost a load of personal files, financial files, other work files, and what hurt most of all, chapters of the book that I’d been working on. I had backed up the USB on the 28th of February, but two main chapters I’d written in the meantime were lost; one titled ‘Media’, and the other a heavily researched and referenced chapter titled ‘Immigration’. All that time and effort down the drain. It honestly felt like I’d been punched in the gut. I was kicking myself too, because I normally always print out physical copies whenever I complete a chapter but hadn’t in this instance.
So my afternoon was spent trying to scramble together the reports for the directors and also assess and rectify as much of the damage resulting from the loss. I did eventually get the report sorted and the directors were understanding of my USB corruption. By this time it was around 3:30 pm, so much for a nice relaxing day. Anyway, the reason I’m writing this is because I feel it does contain some valuable lessons. And, just to mention, it’s also at times like this, when you’re thrust into uncomfortable situations, that you can learn about yourself and grow.
Of course, during the ordeal my mind threw up a whole host of emotions; at times it was angry, and at others I could have cried, but I realized the superficiality of it all. The present moment is what it is. It doesn’t care about your worries or what you’ve done. It doesn’t care that I’ve put in the time to write chapters of a book that have been lost. It is what it is. I realized I can either embrace the present moment, take a brace, and start moving forward. Or I can run away from it into self-pity, anger, and bitterness. I feel in life too often do such events get the better of us. We build up such a rhetoric in our minds that sometimes the resultant stress is just too much for us to handle.
When you come back to the present moment you realize that this entire notion of what you’ve created in your imagination doesn’t even exist. Why should I let my mind make me feel terrible when in reality I’m perfectly fine? Have I not got everything I need? Am I not alive, breathing, healthy? Why spend my time worrying and consumed by stress when I simply don’t need to be? What has happened has happened, I can choose to accept it or try to escape from it. I can blame myself as much as I want. Perhaps I should have backed up the USB more frequently. Perhaps I should have been storing all my documents in the cloud. But who cares, what has happened has happened. You live and you learn; you have to roll with the punches.
I feel there are two takeaways from this experience. One, you never know what to expect. What I thought would be a calm day turned into a stormy one. But it is here in the storm that you are given the opportunities to grow and come out stronger once the storm has passed. Things will rise to the surface, and by being conscious of them you can ensure they don’t creep into your current actions. And secondly, it does no good to try to alter or amend events once they have taken place. The present moment is what it is. Trying to deny or escape from events that have taken place does no good. This is because in trying to escape, remedy, or live through past events you are giving them significance. And when you’re giving the illusory past significance it holds you back from living and growing in the present. If you can learn to roll with the punches how can you ever be hurt?
The Candlelight 
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