On Saturday afternoon, my computer had a nervous breakdown. One minute it was fine, the next the spinning beach ball of death sat suspended on my monitor. It had had enough. And since computers are more tactful than homo sapiens we all know that the beach ball is the computer’s way of giving us the middle finger. This is especially the case if you happen to be halfway through an episode of MI-5 on Netflix during nap time.
Like a desperate man threatening to throw himself off of a bridge, one by one parts of the system started to fail. The dock disappeared. The background went grey. I rebooted. Same thing. No icons. No signs of life just a vacant stare.
The problem and the solution were thankfully kind of simple. My Macbook has 120 GB of space and over the last three years I have owned it, I have slammed pictures, podcasts, videos, and audio into that little (yes, 120 GB seems small now–current MacBook Pros start with 250 GB) space. It was so full that there wasn’t sufficient space to run the normal functions like displaying icons and wallpaper. Thankfully I don’t have to buy a new computer, I just need to get rid of some of the 9,000 photos or hundreds of old podcasts cluttering up my hard drive.
Sometimes I feel like my computer–there is so much coming into my life that sometimes I think my eyes may be replaced with beach balls. Sorry, your input doesn’t commute.
In a digital world we still need space and time to be still and to be silent. In fact, we need it more than ever since silence and solitude were often part of life for ancient people–working the field, riding to town, all could be opportunities to practice the presence of God in the absence of our contemporary stimuli.
Do you ever feel like you’re over capacity? How do you make space of quiet?
Jeff Gissing 