I wrote my first blog post on December 27, 2006, seventeen years ago.  Over those years, A LOT has happened in my life.  My mother died three days after that post, I got divotced and remarried, my girls have graduated from high school, college, and grown to be working adults.  Offspring No. 2 has married and given us two grandsons, the pandemic has happened, I retired and then unretired, just to name a few of those things.  Also over all those years, I have been inconsistent at best aboutwriting regular blog posts.  Today I stopped and had a hard think about why that is.  Partially it has to do with what I said in my very first post, who really wants to read what I write.  But the bigger reason is that I have not made writing time a priority in my life.  My life is busy, but not so busy that I don’t have the time to write.  It is that I haven’t taken the time to write.  That is no one’s fault but my own.  That is a gift that only I can give to myself.  As I read back through a few of my older posts earlier today, I realize how valuable the gift of time is…everyone’s time.  I was so grateful to have taken the time to write those posts and that I have had so many experiences about which to write, experiences that I took the time to have.  I often joke about things that I feel have been a waste of time by saying, “Well, that was an hour of my life I’ll never get back.”  The older I get, the more serious that statement becomes.  I am learning to value my own time more and also the time that others take from their lives to share with me.

My birthday comes at the end of a week of celebrations in our family.  Offspring No. 1’s birthday is December 22, Offspring No. 2’s is December 23, then there is Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.  Our family Christmas celebration this year was on the 26th now that Offspring No. 2 has to split her time with her husband’s family.  We had a respite on the 27th.  And here we are celebrating again, or still, on the 28th.  Everyone is tired, especially the little boys, but they took the time to come share my birthday with me this afternoon.  We spent a chilly hour at the park playing together and then went to our favorite local deli for dinner.  It was the perfect way to celebrate!  They did give me a jacket in my favorite blue and orange that I absolutely love, but I love even more that they took the time to drive the forty-five minutes to come spend time together.

After “ten bites of hamburger” we took time to share our favorite deli black and white cookie.  It was gone before I thought to take a photo.

This morning, Weber took the time to go get birthday doughnuts.  We don’t have doughnuts often, so these was truly a birthday treat!

In between breakfast and dinner, I took time to do something that I needed to do.

I am not a hoarder.  Ask Weber.  He’ll be the first to tell you that I am quick, maybe too quick, to discard things.  I don’t like clutter.  Not because I am morally opposed to it.  Your clutter doesn’t bother me, but in my space, my clutter paralyzes me.  I literally can’t function amidst clutter.  The one place where I fail at decluttering is in my email INBOX.  This morning, I had slightly over 47,000 emails in my INBOX, some read but the majority were unread.  The fact that there were so many has nothing to do with a fear of getting rid of them and everything to do with not being willing to take the time to delete them on a daily basis.  Why?  Because I believed my time was too valuable to waste it deleting emails that I didn’t want in the first place.  But then I got to the place where I didn’t even want to open my email because…well, because my INBOX was full of clutter and just like clutter in my physical space, this digital clutter also made me feel paralyzed.  So my birthday gift to myself was to fix this situation, to get my INBOX to 0 by the end of the year.

As I sit down to write this post,  my INBOX has 62 items in it.  How symbolic is that since today is my 62nd birthday?  Maybe it’s not symbolic but just plain creepy.  Anyway, it took me most of my day to get to this point.  And yes, I will never get those hours of my life back, but hopefully these hours spent will make the hours and days that come next better.  Most of the emails that are still left just need to be moved into folders.  That is my next step.  Hopefully I’ll take it tomorrow.

What did I learn through this process?

1. A little bit of swiping left every day will make next year’s birthday more fun.
2. Swipe left means something totally different to me than it does to those on Tinder.
3. Bulk delete is awesome.
4. With bulk delete you learn very quickly who sends you too many emails.
5. Unsubscribe is a valuable tool.
6. There is a correlation between the need for bulk delete and unsubscribe.
7. Digital organization is just as important as physical organization.
8. Don’t do a massive clean out of your INBOX on your birthday.

RE No. 8 above:  As I was happily hitting delete, delete, delete, I got a Happy Birthday message from one of my best friends.  In addition to happy birthday, she also said, “check your email.”  Uh oh.  Because we live thousands of miles apart, we often send each other e-gift cards for birthdays.  I figured that is what she had done…and hoped that I had not inadvertantly deleted her gift.  Because we are the kind of friends who can share anything, I told her how I was spending my birthday and asked, at the risk of ruining her surprise, who the email was from.  She laughed at my situation and gave me the sender info.  I did not have the email in my INBOX, but it was also not in my Trash folder.  Being the understanding person that she is, she said that she had the confirmation email from her purchase and, if necessary, would ask that the gift certtificate be resent.  Thankfully, the gift arrived in my INBOX about an hour after she and I had this conversation.

Hopefully I have not deleted anything else of major importance.  I tried to be careful but when you delete over 45,000 emails in a few hours, mistakes may happen.  Fortunately, the deleted emails will sit in my Trash folder for thirty days.

This post is not about keeping your INBOZ cleared out or how to spend your birthday or which way to swipe on Tinder.  It is about realizing that time is the most valuable thing we have and we need to learn how to spend it wisely.  There is no one right or wrong way to spend time.  But there is a right reason to give your time to someone or something…because doing so makes your life bigger, better and brighter, because doing so brings you joy.

Clearing our my INBOX didn’t necessaril;y bring me joy, but having it cleared out does.  And spending time with those that I love fills my life with the biggest brightest light and the best kind of joy.  I will always take the time for the people I love.

It has taken me a long time to come to the place where I can say and mean that one of those people that I love is myself.  And one of the things that my self needs to take time to do is write.  That said, my goal for 2024 is to keep my INBOX empty and my blog feed full.

What are you going to take time for in 2024?