Cleaning Out My E-Mail Box

12 Mulk 162 B.E. February 17-18, 2006 A.D.

As I was looking at my e-mail today, I realized I had not cleaned out one of my e-mail boxes in about a week. What this means is that I have sever old e-mails taking up space in my e-mail box and on my computer (I am referring to the e-mail that I can exclusively access at home). Actually I have 1,023 unread e-mails in my inbox, some of those e-mails I want to read and some I do not. So I am going to have to clean out my e-mail box.

Now there are two ways I can go about this project. I can either spend the rest of the day cleaning out the e-mail box or I can do it a little bit at a time. I can go through the inbox and delete the stuff I know I don’t want to read or investigate and taking care of the items that must be taken care of immediately. Then over the next week I can check out the other and see if there is anything that I feel is necessary to investigate. No matter how I go about it, it is going to take a while and I do not want to interfere with other events that are just as important or more important then the e-mails in my inbox. OK, so this entire problem is my own fault and I would not have this problem if I took care of the e-mails that come in on a daily basis.

After thinking about this awhile, there appears to be a spiritual lesson here. Cleaning out the e-mail inbox is like bringing myself to account. If I want to overcome bad habits, change a habit or live according to Baha‘u‘llah‘s instructions, I need to work on it daily. Daily work on a problems means bring myself to account and looking at what I did that day then resolving and attempting to do better tomorrow. Most of the time when I bring myself to account, I do not writing anything in a journal. Maybe I need to start bringing myself to account in one of my journals on a daily basis. I start a spiritual journal at the beginning of Mulk, this last week I have not written anything in it perhaps I need to bring myself to account in that journal. A journal entry need only be one or two sentences on how I can do better in the future.