What's the Lesson Here?

 Light Chaos by Kevin Dooley

I don’t know if it’s the magnetic forces building as we slide into the core of the Milky Way, or maybe I'm wearing a sign on my virtual back that says “Trash My ’Puter” or something like that. My desktop machine (Hotshot) has lost the ability to record sound (think “Podcast Impossible”). Jack, my middle-aged ’Puter Wizard, is in the midst of finals week, and doesn’t want to hear my whining, or even take my money. He does his best to keep me self-empowered anyway. He assures me the sound card does work, so it's a Windows thing, and I “just” need to do a clean install and rebuild the system.

“NO!” I yell into the phone. “NOT THAT!” I have, oh, maybe 120 programs installed — true, half can be dumped — but it takes days to rebuild my system.

“Deal with it,” he tells me, in much kinder words.

Adding insult to injury, last night I discovered my laptop no longer recognizes our home network. The CMU wireless network I connected to Tuesday afternoon fried this function, and I can’t connect to the hard drive on Hotshot where I store all my files. This has happened before, and I’ve always relied on System Restore to make things right. System Restore has let me down. It looks as if a fresh installation of Vista is in the cards for the laptop. This system is less complicated and will only take one day. It's been acting wiggy anyway.

How’s a person supposed to find time to write?

After a quick test for compatibility and further consultation with Wizard Jack, I've resolved to replace Hotshot’s aging XP brain with Windows 7. I have to reformat and rebuild her anyway, and this should extend her life another couple of years. So add learning a new operating system to this mix I just described.

In case life weren't already exciting enough, my hubby just ordered parts for Jack to build him a new system (and I know who is going to end up holding whose hand while he installs his favorite apps), and the ophthalmologist who was scheduled to perform cataract surgery on my eyes in less than two  weeks just decided to hand me off to “someone better qualified” which will result in an additional delay of around two months. My head is spinning.

I seriously consider zipping up my down-lined red parka (red will fend off the deer hunters slipping through the woods just now) and going out to sit on a stump under our tri-centenarian oak, sucking my thumb, chanting, and rocking until I turn numb from the cold and . . . 

Wait! Sarabelle is saving me from myself. She just started a banner scrolling through my mind: What’s the message here? What are you supposed to learn? What’s the story? Ah, yes! The message. The story. Am I living my beliefs to the hilt? What sort of messages am I showering myself with? What would I like to have happen as a result of this craziness? These questions sent me scampering for my journal.

This is the true value of life writing: to write my heart out in times like this, to get these thoughts on the page where I can see them and work with them, and defuse their ability to sting and cause chaos. And in the process I’m certain to discover amazing ideas and answers.

Write now: make a list of questions you’d like to have answered about an area of chaos in your life — past, present or future. Use those questions as journaling prompts, then write a short essay about what you hope and expect to see happen.