Laptop Stolen

Had the laptop stolen few hours after the last update. I left the window open which the builder didn't close so easy take for who ever it was. Realised almost immediately what had happened. Made a few phone calls to confirm and then went into auto pilot to cancel all my internet banking and cards, change all my passwords (thanks to my sister on the phone) and call the police. Had forensics in the next day but only a foot print remained... altho there was a finger print on the ethernet cable... need to work out whether its worth giving that in. Thankfully I have a backup of my documents and most music ideas but a lot of photos and other things are gone.

I switched on my usual "theft" thinking which is that I have given the laptop to someone. It makes sense since me and whoever now possesses it, taken as a group of people, remain unchanged after the theft. There are still two people and one laptop, it is just in his hands and not mine. He is a good friend of mine altho I have never met him. It is not positive to think about him as self centred and unthoughtful of other people, much better that he is a person in need of help and I was there to help him. That said the £100 he will get for a second hand laptop I could have given him if he had asked and that would have saved me all the work of having to reconstruct my work environment on another computer and lose a lot of stuff in the process. It did force home something I blogged a few weeks ago about how trust is essential for meaning. If everything kept getting stolen there would be no time to construct anything really worthwhile.

I saw a flower the next day, and looked at the wide blue sky and realised deep down that actually I have lost nothing because like that blog on Continuity nothing has really changed and everything that was beautiful and worthwhile is still with me. This really hammers home the importance of Nature. I need to get that written out definatively because it is something I have sort since a child.

This experience has reinforced my loathing of material things. How insecure and useless they are. I pity the people who spend their lives trying to accumulate such tiny and insignificant things. Rather than turn toward the value that is lost this has turned me further the other way. I suppose, as my sister said to me, "this is typical of you" because anyone else would have taken more care to make sure the computer wasn't left in the open on a building site!! This is true and lesson learned. But at the same time the hassle involved in protecting things of "value" feels like grit in the eye to me, or sand under my shirt or in my bed, it simply gets in the way of appreciating things. Better to appreciate what is free and unhindered like the sky, the sun, the clouds, the insects. I'm off on holiday in a few days: this has forced me to reorient to what I love most - freedom.

Something else comes of this. I have complained about the practicality of not getting paid: that I won't have money to eat. Actually food is very easy to find. In return however I have been given that bike and now I was given an old laptop to continue with - which is what I write upon now. What a better world it is when we don't have to protect what is "ours" because when someone takes what is "ours" someone else will give u something else to be "ours". This is the true spirit of sharing and if one believes the religious writers the return to us from sharing is 10 fold. Thus the time and work that I freely shared with that family to tutor their son, "for the record" is worth 10 times that in value. I say "for the record" because no-one who is freely giving would ever keep an account. My faith was weak, the fear of starvation is very great - a sign that in this "advanced" economy, after all the alleged Progress, we are still hounded by the same old primitive fears of our ancestors 10,000 years ago and more.

Just doing the Citizenship revision there was a passage on public and private ownership. It said that private owned companies seek profit, while public owned seek to supply services. Almost a joke the way they wrote it - interesting that the people who design the education curriculum seem to think more along my lines.

There are endless things on all scales that could change for the better. That said liaising with the police and the forensics has been an interesting process. It is a great job that they all do, a million miles away from the fascist enforcers of the "status quo" that I accused them of being in blogs a year ago. I guess they are indeed just people doing their job - altho they are probably unaware the magnitude of the structure that collectively they maintain. Arguing Devils Advocate with my tutee after he suggested we could do without money, I see there is a very strong argument for these things (money, police, status quo) and arguments against these really do have to absorb and account for a vast great deal. I hope I am developing a view here that can progress beyond the status quo and doesn't just trivially reject it and all the things that it does achieve.

Anyway losing the laptop has (rather cliched) been a moment of freedom. I hope that it doesn't turn out to be to much o a set back in the future. Thanks to this blog, more than anything, I still have most of my ideas intact anyway (except music ones).

(Had some thought about Kropotkin over the last few days - somehow this has made me realise how we don't really own anything. Something to do with the unimaginable amount of human learning and effort that goes into making a computer that is a group effort that all the human race past, present and future shares like how I am now, altho unplanned, sharing my old computer.