The source of the quote may surprise you:
This is a ruthless world and one must be ruthless to cope with it.
It’s from Charlie Chaplin in Monsieur Verdoux (1947), uttered during a pivotal scene when he, a former bank clerk turned serial seducer and murderer, justifies his actions.
It was also my guiding principle as I prepped my move.
Working with my favorite TaskRabbit Vladimir HERE I went through every single one of my possessions with a stone-cold heart, then meticulously organized everything I was taking.
Even Omar, the seasoned head of the moving crew, was impressed, declaring that it’s been years since he’d seen a move this organized.
My triumph, however, was short-lived, for as Nelson Mandela noted:
“After climbing a great hill,
one only finds that there are
many more hills to climb.“
For me, the next hill was digital.
With the bulk my material possessions safely stored away in clearly labeled, color-coded bins, now it was time to roll up my sleeves and address my laptop.
The process began smoothly enough, with numerous conversations with ChatGPTabout the best ways to restructure record-keeping and task-outlining programs like Evernote and Things.
Sidebar: I have to give a shout out to one of my previous Virtual Assistants, Rajil for being Verdoux-level ruthless when going through galleys from digital photoshootsfor projects.
I’m pretty good at it, but he was merciless.
I’d breeze through 50 images from one setup, and without hesitation, he’d say: “Use 8766 for the website, keep 8781 for yourself.”
One of the benefits of rigorously going through your possessions—both digital and material—is that you find things you’d totally forgotten you had.
In my case, I discovered everything from scarves I’d bought on trips, to a lifetime’s supply of blank-books for journaling, even an entire Master Class I created almost a decade ago that never got released.
Stumbling on the latter, I listened to it for the first time since recording it.
Happy that there was some solid content included, I realized at the end that I had directed people to share their stories with an email address that doesn’t exist.
I assumed that creating that email address would be easier than re-recording or editing out that section, but I was surprised by the “Yes, And” challenges—this month’s meditation theme HERE— that unfolded.
Alas, creating the email I’d casually mentioned a decade ago proved far more complicated than I thought.
Telling my tech guy what I needed, I assumed a Miranda Priestly moment would follow where my every request would materialize almost instantly.
Instead, he kept forwarding me emails in our chat from the hosting service like this one (which I suggest you merely skim if you bother to read it at all):
As an apology for including that, just for fun, here’s a video of Vlad and my every morning frolic in the grove near my family’s house.
Obviously, these days, the possibility of 48 hours without email feels like a death sentence.
After an extensive chat with my friend ChatGPT, I found another way—some hack involving aliases and subdomains and god-knows-what—and it was almost working.
Here was the last step and frankly, the entire point of this email.
After opening the settings gear, ChatGPT suggested:
Under Importance Markers, select
“Don’t use my past actions
to predict which messages are important.“
Wow…
Honestly, I couldn’t have asked for a better embodiment of last month’s “Fresh Start” theme and this month’s “Yes, And…” than those instructions.
I’ve quoted this poem by Wendell Berry before, but it feels so perfectly apt, here it is again.
The Real Work
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
Embracing “Yes, And…”—again, Meditation HERE—means welcoming the unknown, letting go of mistakes, and living in the moment.
And sometimes—as with my email server—that can indeed be more than a little baffling to the mind, even though it’s apparently where the journey begins.
I do have another perfect “Yes, And…” story to report.
Writing last week HERE about the only casualty of my move—the two-story maple tree I couldn’t take with me—I also shared that many of its seedlings are still thriving in Brooklyn.
I was delighted though, when a friend I know only through these correspondences reminded me that we’d done a seedling exchange a few years ago, and thatanother of my tree’s descendants is thriving in Maine.
The loss of the original still smarts, but this definitely makes me very happy.
Despite the ruthlessness of this world—and the corresponding moving strategy I’ve adopted—life keeps responding with more ‘Yes, And…’ moments.
Experiencing our forgotten treasures—whether it’s scarves, books, or Master Classes—is more than a walk down memory lane.
We’re not the same person we were the first time around.
As T.S. Eliot tells us, “The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
More than just in my email settings, I want to instruct my subconscious:
Under Importance Markers, select
“Don’t use my past actions
to predict which messages are important.“
I want to be open to whatever life has in store for me, offering an enthusiastic “Yes, And…” to all of it.
Namaste for Now
