A New Start

The hard drive of my laptop crashed and I lost years worth of saved data.

I keep important professional and personal data on the Cloud so all the important data was recovered but still I had this feeling that I had lost so much. I believe, I lost thousands of saved family pictures. I lost hundreds of documents I had downloaded, hoping to read someday. I lost so many random files I had not opened in years. I also lost a few working documents that I had not uploaded on the cloud, yet.

As the shock of the loss subsided and I picked up the pieces of my life again, I realized that a hard drive crash is pretty similar to a new birth of my digital self. Just like, death makes us loose all our material possessions, my hard drive crash made me lose all my digital baggage. Just like, we still carry forward our mind, intellect and ego to our next birth, I did carry forward all my relevant important data to my upgraded laptop (by downloading it from the cloud). Just like, we get a brand new body to start our journey of life again, I got a brand new SSD in my laptop.

Oh! What fun it is, to work on a faster, cleaner, better organized laptop! Makes me wonder why we fear a hard drive crash? Makes me wonder, why do we fear death? Both are simply ways of nature to give us a fresh start on our journey. Continuing the thought process, had I upgraded my laptop with an SSD months ago, maybe my HDD would not have crashed under the load. Maybe, if I support my physical body with an energized and focused mind, my body will not break down under the daily stress of life.

Through the pain and shock and time lost, I got a chance to experience death and birth. I experienced that if we have lived our life fully, learnt what we had to learn, accumulated abundance of good karma, then even when death takes away all that we consider materially ours, it will just be a step forward towards a new, better us.

A new birth does not guarantee a problem free, happy life. A new birth just means a fresh chance to deal with problems we were not able to tackle well in the last life. Similarly, a new SSD does not guarantee smooth operations for my ever after digital life. I know, there will be many times I will be searching and missing some of the data that I lost. But Hey! If I have learnt my lesson well, I will be better in backing up my data. I will be better at preparing for death and a new life.

Note: I am student of Vedanta and try to apply what I am learning to simple things I experience in life. I find my learnings profound (for myself). I write on Medium to share my experiences with others who are seeking the meaning of life through Vedanta. I would love to hear your thoughts and experiences about Vedanta.