Apologies dear friends, acquaintances, neighbors, lost pets, vendors, insurance companies, politicians, and things that I needed to remember in 2019. I have deleted your emails.

My email inbox has for a long time been a file cabinet that never gets sorted. I hang onto letters from friends and prayer requests and photos. Those all seem worthy of saving. I have saved receipts. Possibly important.

Regrettably, I also hang onto articles I wanted to refer to someday and then forget. I hang onto blog posts that seem full of wisdom. I hang onto the community garden newsletter and the city newsletter and the Greater Niles Village newsletter. I hang onto notices of sales. Online magazines. Random emails from my neighborhood e-group about garage sales and lost pets. To be fair, much of that is stuff I just forgot to delete. I wasn’t really saving them.

Really.

I did discover an email from a friend whose contact information had been lost. So, that was a win!

As for the rest of it? It all had added up to a huge word salad that was impossible to consume. And so today, I did a wholesale dump of everything that wasn’t current.

Unread wisdom is just clutter.

One of my new goals is to be more intentional. OK, I confess. This has been a perennial goal, but now I am acting on it! And while I probably discarded wisdom and heartfelt sentiments, they wouldn’t have done me much good if I didn’t read and internalized them. Unread wisdom is just clutter.

It is the difference between owning a cookbook and eating whatever happens to be at hand. It is the difference between owning a Bible and following Jesus.

Whether I will remain intentional has yet to be determined. I am learning that being intentional takes more time. It requires living in the moment. It asks you to commit again and again. Even so, I am determined to deal with email (and other things, I hope) in the moment. No more saving for later only to be forgotten. Act on it. Delete it and move on. That’s my new mantra.

Wish me luck.