Emptiness of E-mail

A guided meditation

Find a comfortable position. Wherever you are. Sitting, lying, standing on a train. It does not matter. Close your eyes.

Take a slow breath in. And out. Let the shoulders drop. The jaw. The small muscles around the eyes that have been bracing all morning without your permission.

In your mind, conjure the screen. The familiar one. The light of it. The shape of the window. The little envelope icon, the stylised M, the red number floating in the corner of the dock like a small accusation. Let it be vivid. The exact pixel dimensions of your particular dread.

Now click.

The inbox appears. Allow it to. Don’t flinch.

Let your inner gaze pass over the stack. The senders’ names. The boldfaced unread. The newsletters you signed up for in 2017 from a company whose product you have never used. The thread with the subject line beginning RE: RE: RE: FW: RE:. The receipt for something you bought and have already worn out. Notice the body’s small surge — that familiar tightness in the chest that says I should have answered that.

Don’t act on it. Just notice. The tightness arises. The tightness will pass. It does not require you.

Now. Let the cursor move to the first message at the top.

Click on it. Lightly. As though you were touching the surface of a still pond.

Now press Cmd+A. Or Ctrl+A. Whichever your operating system has assigned you in this life.

Watch as every message becomes selected. Highlighted. Held in a single trembling field of blue. Twelve emails, three hundred emails, eleven thousand emails — it makes no difference. They are now one thing. A field. A weather system.

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

This is the moment of pause. The moment before. Notice any resistance. The voice that says but what if. The voice that says I might need that one. The voice that conjures an imagined future in which an unspecified person asks you for a piece of information contained in a message from 2019, and you, having deleted it, are exposed as careless.

Thank that voice. It has kept you safe in many small ways. It does not know about emptiness. It cannot know.

When you are ready — and only when you are ready — let your finger find the Delete key.

Press it.

Watch them go.

The animation is brief. A small whoosh. A folding inwards. The inbox empties. The number on the dock falls to zero or vanishes entirely. Where there was a city of words there is now a flat plane.

Sit with this for a moment.

Notice that you are still here. Your heart still beats. Whatever you feared has not arrived, or has arrived and is no worse than the previous tightness, which has also gone.

But the practice is not yet complete.

The messages are not gone. They have been moved. They wait in a folder named Trash, or Deleted Items, or Bin — depending on the dialect of your particular machine. They are in the bardo. The intermediate state. They could still be retrieved. They are watching to see if you mean it.

Navigate now to that folder.

Look upon them once more. The whole accumulated correspondence of a season, a year, a decade. Notice that from this distance they look smaller. Less urgent. Already half-faded, like things glimpsed from a moving train.

Right-click. Or open the menu. Find the option that says Empty Trash. Empty Bin. Delete Forever. The phrasing varies; the gesture is the same.

A dialogue box may appear. Are you sure? it will ask. It will ask this earnestly, as though it cared. As though you owed it an answer.

Yes.

Click.

Watch the count fall to zero. Hear the small confirmatory sound, if your machine has been configured to make one. Feel, perhaps, a coolness move through the chest. Or nothing at all. Either is fine. Both are the practice.

And now — sit with the empty rectangle. The empty folder. The white space where the world used to be.

What you carried, you may notice now, was the believing-in-them. The sense that they were owed something, or that you were. The inbox, examined closely, has no inherent inbox-nature. It is a convention. A name we agreed to give to a region of memory belonging to a company in California.

Stay here.

As long as you like.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​