Question to consider: What is one area where I need to stop thinking my way and start thinking God’s way?
“May 14 (or 15, because it’s 1:00 a.m.)
“ I can’t think of a specific area right now.”
“(Later) I suppose the area (which I really hate to admit and don’t want to surrender) would be TV, specifically previously videotaped. A lot of my free time goes to catching up, though several I can watch while washing dishes, folding laundry, or playing computer games. Lately I also spend a lot of thought energy on sorting out where I will put ‘this week’s’ episode, and which one I urgently need to watch to make room.
“I guess the first step is admitting I have a problem, but I think that’s as far as I’m willing to go.”
Dearest Rachel –
I’m afraid this is a situation that you never really conquered; if nothing else, I can confirm that you left a whole lot of videotape behind that you probably meant to watch again at some point but never got back to. And I don’t know whether to bother with digitizing it, as I know that neither Daniel nor I will get to it watching any of it in our foreseeable future, even though it seems like one of the better ways to honor you, by preserving those things that you thought were worth preserving back in the day.
You might remember how, these last couple of years, it became much more difficult to get us to join you in watching Doctor Who episodes in particular. I observed that the watching of each episode in a timely fashion began to feel more like an obligation and then some thing either Daniel or I truly wanted to do. At the same time, we wanted to keep you happy, and this was a way to do it, but I think it grew more difficult over time, as other things clamored for our attention and crowded that show out.
But it was probably the best example I’m such a situation; certainly the most consistent, as you collected it from childhood and had me continuing to collect it until shortly before the accident. We did finish that last season before you left, but only just, since it’s marquee episodes would run on Christmas and New Years, as virtual national traditions in the U.K., and I would collect them for you once I could find them online.
I will say that I suffer from the same distraction, albeit in somewhat different directions. I have things that I collect that I can’t let go of; some of them are the things that I collected for you to watch and enjoy, in fact. It’s the sort of sense of ‘well, I spent so much time gathering all this, I don’t want to delete it at this point,’ even though I’m painfully aware that I’ll likely never actually watch or read or listen to it in the future. It’s almost as if the joy for me is in the pursuit and the obtaining, rather than in the actual use of the property. And that’s just straight up greed, isn’t it?
Letters to Rachel 