When You Lose Something Precious

16th March 2021

I bought the "RingVin" domain name about 5 years ago when the entrepreneurial bug hit me.  I then created a web-site which centred around essentially my then profession - Market Research.  


However, for various reasons I got into employment again, and I basically hid the web-site from public view.  When the time came for renewal, I only renewed the domain name, not knowing that if I also did not renew the web hosting fees, the web-site will get deleted.

Later I realised with horror that while I still owned the "RingVin" domain, it was completely empty - the original web-site I had constructed with great difficulty had been deleted and irretrievably lost for ever.  All the time and effort I had put in to think through and construct the original web-site had been wasted. 

When recently the time came for me to get back to doing my own thing, I chaffed that my web-site was no longer operational.  All the tools for web-site construction had completely changed and I dreaded the prospect of trying to recreate and rebuild my old website from scratch.

When I realised that post-poning is not going to help, I forced myself to learn the new tools for designing web-sites and started constructing my current web-site.  As I went about re-constructing my website I started introspecting and then I realised that my thinking about what I want to do now is completely different from what I had set out to do 5 years ago.  This made me think everything from scratch - and I designed and created a completely different web-site. This new web-site not only now faithfully reflects what I want to do now, it is also a lot more (to me) aesthetic and tasteful compared to my previous one.

In retrospect I am glad that I lost my original old web-site.  If I still had it I would have continued today with my old website with probably only some minor cosmetic changes.  But since I had to start from scratch it made me think afresh about bigger things - and especialy about what I really wanted to do.

Losing what you have is painful and traumatic - but not necessarily a bad thing.  The inconvenience and pain you go through is a small price to pay for the learning and fresh perspective on life you gain when you are forced to start from scratch.  And often - as in my case - starting from scratch can completely changes one's life trajectory.

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