Minimize to Tray

Booting-Up

Every time I fire up my laptop it goes through a sequential series of actions, a boot-up routine. Eventually the operating system is invoked, the screen comes to life, and I get invited to put in my password. After that there comes the automatic loading of some set programs, applications, of primary action.

I guess this happens for us all – right across the board, wherever we are. In fact, in some people’s perceptions, this could be the daily boot-up routine for us, ourselves – the “Human Computer”, if you like.

And, rather like with our computers, not every boot sequence runs smoothly. Something has got in there and made things run much slower, or we notice certain things we might describe as glitches. And for our laptops’ Human counterparts, these might be last night’s food or drink intake, a virus that has got in under the radar and attacked our immune system, the symptoms of a periodic illness that has flared up once more, a disturbed night of sleep for particular reasons either physical or mental…
And, I say this with a degree of tongue in cheek of course, all of this is long before we might notice what the weather outside is doing!

Well, now I’ve set the scene for you, I’ll return to my own laptop’s auto-load programs. 

For me, there is one that stops all action until I deal with it – Amazon Music. The screen just comes up saying “Act Now – or Freeze.” Well, no it doesn’t actually say that since it’s not yet been imbued with Alexa-like powers! But I am required to take some action – so I click the “X” in the top right-hand corner which then leads to a further “take action” request – which brings me to the creative kernel of this observation. I can do one of two things: I can either EXIT completely, or I can …

MINIMIZE TO TRAY

Now, for me with music, I would never EXIT completely. Music is a key component of my life – I hear it all the time, it is in my head; I see it all the time, in the world around me; I feel it all the time, in the resonances of the world and myself. Yes, I’m a bit weird, like that!
So, no, yes – it is an integral part of me, and of ME!

And so, on my laptop’s awakening, I always MINIMIZE TO TRAY.

Side-Tracking

Now, one of the things that tends to happen in our lives – it certainly happens to me – is that once MUSIC has been minimized to tray, or in other words set aside for however long the moment might be, then it is no longer active – on screen.

Even for me, given all that I’ve said about MUSIC being everywhere in my life and an integral part of the me that I am, there are times when I get side-tracked. Quite literally, at these times, the tracks in the play-list of my life do NOT contain any MUSIC. I am out of touch with that integral part of me.

I’ve got SO much going on in the foreground of my life – on the SCREEN, if you like – that the soundtrack, that’s been minimized to tray, is not in evidence. I’m dealing with on-screen stuff so much that I can’t hear that the MUSIC is not there. It’s missing.

Until, that is, the very moment that I do notice it’s missing.

OMG! Where’s the music gone to?

Well, deep down we know, I know it is – actually - always there, a bit like the sun on a bad weather day that’s there above the clouds.
And in that moment the OMG hits home, I intuitively know that I need to pause, take a deeper breath, and allow my metaphorical cursor finger to GO TO TRAY, in order to click on “music”.

Inside-Out

One of the most seductive things about the lives we lead is the SCREEN. We are told, very early in our lives, that we must attend to the screen and what’s going on there – and of course, in the metaphor of the Screen, that is how we get to live our lives “In the Now”.

However the screen is a very demanding place and what happens when we load and run LOTS of programs – and flip all of those things from foreground to background on a regular basis? We forget about the things we have MINIMIZED TO TRAY.

We’ve crammed so much into our screen activity, that we’ve lost touch with the some of the key things that are important to us, perhaps those things integral to, nay even part of, our identity.

Once we understand that the stuff going on on-screen is, essentially, Outside of us – then we intuitively know how to handle the OMG moments.

Until that understanding arrives, we’ll perhaps get an inkling that we aren’t what’s going on on-screen. Yet these occasional and insightful moments will flash in and out, on and off, like shafts of sunlight through the breaks in those clouds on the bad weather days.

Those inklings were certainly KEY for me. They got me started on sorting out the things that I’d been wanting to change for years, yet didn’t have an idea how or where to start. You could say I got lucky.

I got curious – I got back to what we all are in the first years of our lives. CURIOUS about anything and everything around us. 

What’s that? How does this work? Where does that go? How do I …? And so on. Eventually I encountered the Inside-Out nature of reality – the perspective I was born with and then lost touch with.

Self-Satisfied

Pursue curiosity and you will place yourself on a pathway to becoming properly self-satisfied. Self-satisfied has nothing to do with SMUGNESS or being the great I AM.

When a baby moves from crawling to taking those first steps you know there’s a HUGE amount of self-satisfaction there on the inside, for baby. They’ve broken free into being now EVEN MORE capable of discovering more about this world they are part of. Their curiosity is being fired up now with every step they take.
Baby has not yet encountered the emotion and behaviour of SELF CENTRED AGGRANDISEMENT, of SMUG. Baby has merely satisfied a curiosity.

And on the metaphorical laptop for Baby, the Screen IS also the TRAY. Amongst everything baby does there is nothing that is minimized to tray. That comes later!

So, get curious enough to take a good long look at the TRAY of YOUR life. Notice what is there, notice what you regularly put there, and whether you lose touch with those things when the TRAY is unnoticeable in the hurly-burly of your daily lives as you attend to endless on-screen stuff?

Take care with what you Minimize to Tray. I’ve known a lot of people who actually, though unwittingly, have minimized their lives to Tray in order to deal with all that “really important” stuff that is on-screen. I used to be one of those people – and at the time I thought I knew myself.