Reboot

Sometimes starting over is refreshing. We set aside the old and begin again. It is the feeling of a clean slate. But starting over is just as liable to be stressful. The thing I tried before didn’t work and now I’m about to try it again. Maybe this time it will be different. Then again, it might not. It often isn’t. Beginning again may be the proof of my resolve. Or it may only be an exercise in magical thinking.

A few days ago I learned that my blog had crashed. Someone infected it with something and I had to wipe it out and begin again. I wondered how long the pages had been blank (that tells you something about how often I blog). At first, I decided to pull the plug on the whole project. But I couldn’t bring myself to cut the chord. What pained me the most about this was that I was also pretty sure that nobody would notice I was missing from the webiverse. I think I get about ten hits a day on my website. I suspect that most of those are robots. But letting the website disappear into the ether made me feel anxious. I kept brooding about it. What if that one person who needed to find out about my books was searching the web for me? No, that’s not quite honest. That’s what I told myself but the real truth is, I had this unnerving feeling that I would disappear along with my website. I know. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s probably unhealthy. But I decided to begin again and reboot the site.

I have been distracted by the effort. Neglecting other things that I was supposed to be doing in order to resurrect myself. I’m not very good at the technical aspects of the task. And I keep thinking about a quote attributed to Albert Einstein about doing things over and over that haven’t worked before in the hope that they will produce a different result. What is it that he calls that?

Oh, well. I don’t have time to look it up. I have to get my website up and running. I feel a sense of urgency about it. The clock is ticking and I am feeling invisible.