“If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution.”
G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
My personal email account has more than 300 unread emails in it.
Most of them aren’t important.
There was a time when I never had more than a handful of unread emails.
What changed?
I stopped tending to my inbox. Stopped reading. Stopped deleting. Kept subscribing. In Chesterton’s terms, I left the white post of my email alone. It quickly became black.
It’s a rule of life that things that are untended will degrade.
Stop exercising and you will gain weight.
Stop mowing the yard and you’ll soon have a meadow.
Stop keeping a calendar and you’ll be repeatedly late.
The key thing is to ensure that you’re tending to the right things.
Jeff Gissing 