Reboot, Renewal

In Reboot!, a blog post from September 25, 2009 I wrote:

i have been a poor system administrator. sorry.

Like a an Windows machine, if I don’t get system updates and regular reboots I get infested with viruses and malware and all manner of bad behavior. This hardware is flaky. In the past 96 hours I’ve rebooted.

But the world is shiny and new and reinvigorated. Turns out happiness can be obliterated if you change your point of view to the negative. If you see the small betrayals as large, if you emphasize the negative and eliminate the positive, then things go bad. But change is possible, practical, and necessary. I have done it before.

For those of you who are on board, God Bless, for those of you with no interest, also God Bless.

Hey, Onward. I used to say that all the time.

And on the 29th of that same month in 2009 I added a calendar event. And every month on the last day there sits a calendar event with the title “Joe Crawford Reboot.”

15 years of an end-of-month reminder to rethink. To renew. To consider what might be going wrong. To restart.

“Booting” as a term is based on the term “bootstrapping” which was a term of art in computing a long time ago.

And so, “reboot” is that, but again.

And every month I’m still looking at my calendar I get a reminder to rethink, to reconsider.

Sometimes I laugh at it. Sometimes I pretend to ignore it. It always enters my consciousness. How deep does it go? How profound is the change? It varies.

But it keeps alive the notion of what in my life might need to be reworked.

Re-reading that blog post my usage of “God Bless” sure does read like some other fella wrote it. But that was me.

I’ve rebooted many times since then.

There’s a blogger I like who writes about his son. He’s done so for a long time. I remember reading about “Eli 7.2” (as in age 7 years two months) and now when I read him it’s more like “Eli 18.3” and I am of course stunned by the passage of time but also appreciative of the powerful notion that we are all updating to a latest version of ourselves on a regular basis.

In recovery there’s that phrase: “one day at a time” and despite being a cliché there’s a truthful utility in that idiom.

If I break up life into smaller chunks it’s more manageable. If the current chunk sucks or is hard, there’s a new chunk coming soon. One can start that next chunk with a new operating system, a new peripheral, a new environment and maybe things might change for the better.

Operating systems are collections of tools, of hardware and memory and storage and processing power. They vary. We run out of storage. Our megahertz is less. Our co-processors overheat. Our hard drives get fragmented.

Am I talking about computers or my “self?”

Yes.

And so, today, I reboot.

This post is part of the 2025 April IndieWeb Carnival: Renewal.