Human defrag

Last night, my computer refused to turn on, and my friend Danny suggested I run a disk defrag. He explained why it was necessary: disks, once whole, compartmentalise when they save. If you delete something, it doesn't go back and fill up the empty space, it keeps moving along to the next, till eventually, there are lots of tiny spaces, but not enough big ones to let you do anything. A defrag condenses it and makes it whole again - giving you a tightly condensed area and a big open space, allowing you to do what you need to do.

This morning, I read this fantastic post at Chez Fabulous. And I couldn't help connecting it with last night.

Alison talks about personas, the different people we are in different places, the different masks we wear. Sometimes, due to personal development or leaving a particular environment, we drop a persona or mask that no longer serves us, which is great.

But then, do we act like a hard disk? Do we leave that space, not tend to it, not fill it with something more authentic, and carry on fragmenting till we no longer have enough space in our lives to breathe, to do what we need to do, to move forward into truly being ourselves?

Might that be the cause of so much depression, nervous breakdowns, the low to mid-level unhappiness so many of us live with?

Maybe we need to learn to defrag regularly - pulling all those personas into one place, where they can work together as a whole, co-operatively rather separately, making them stronger, more flexible and well-adapted - and leaving us the large empty space we need for breathing, reflecting and resting: in other words, just being.