A spring clean in Autumn

With the new laptop now sitting where it was intended to be enjoyed, I have decided to move my entire administration into one place and for one purpose.
For a long time my digital life has become fragmented. It evolved innocently enough. A quick post on one device, a quick thought on another, a small change in the archives on a third. Each piece of hardware found its own role, and over time I found myself moving constantly between them, always trying to organise and build something functional and sustainable.
Somewhere along the way I achieved the complete opposite.
Instead of freeing up time, the system began consuming it. It became the digital equivalent of spending an entire day running from one building to another, carrying tasks back and forth but never really settling anywhere for long.
It is time to sit down now and bring everything under the same umbrella.
For my health and peace of mind, I have already done this in the physical world. I have gradually moved my life into a single functional space, surrounded by everything I need to live comfortably and quietly for the rest of my days.
As I look around, I see that most of what remains is art-related. Paints, materials, tools, projects and fragments from earlier performances and earlier versions of myself. After seventy years, this is the collection I have carried forward from one stage of life to the next.
Perhaps that is what a life becomes.
Not an accumulation, but a collation.
Everything else has fallen away. What remains are the things that mattered enough to keep. The tools of work, the evidence of curiosity, the objects that survived countless decisions to leave other things behind.
Now it is time for my digital life to catch up with my physical one.
Less movement. Less fragmentation. Less administration.
More sitting. More creating. More living.
And perhaps that, too, is a form of collation.

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