back home

It took me all of Monday and Tuesday just to get through the accumulation of paper that built up around my desk over the past week while I've been away, leaving no time for any remotely creative activity. Then today I read this in Robert Fripp's diary:

As a rule of thumb, if a Happy Gigster is away for 4 weeks it takes 4 weeks to catch up. So, if the Happy Gigster is away for 6 months & one week, they never catch up. Their lives become a mess of stuff that waits to be addressed, settled & stored. This is a brief description of my life over the past 39 years. The time has arrived when, until the past is settled, there is no bright & shining future world that can be brought into being.

Time spent settling the past (or filing it away) does indeed stop the future from coming into being. It's frustrating. But dropping the past into the recycling via the shredder is not necessarily wise, however attractive it might occasionally seem.