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1 " She leaned forward and placed her chin on her fist. 'So. Can you tell me in a sentence or two how I can fix my life using vaastu shastra techniques?'He smiled. 'You'll be surprised to hear that I can. These things may be complex on the surface, but they are built on very simple truths.'He leaned back and joined his fingertips together, looking up and thinking for a few seconds. 'Let me put it like this. Consider your desk, whether it is an office desk, or a table at home where you receive and write letters. What happens at that desk? Answer: every day, a number of letters are received. Or faxes. Or advertisements. These are all items with potential energy applications. They are all bits of paper urging you to react in some way—to buy a product, or respond with a phone call, or change the way you do something. Now what we should do is to react to that potential energy transaction in some way—and thus burn up the energy in it. We should either fulfill it, by doing what it says, or we should make a decision that we are not going to fulfill it, but instead throw the paper away. But, instead, we take that piece of paper and we balance it on our desk, unwilling to make an immediate decision. This happens to a number of pieces of paper every day, and then before we know it, there is a huge pile of pieces of paper on the desk. When it gets too high, we take the pile of paper and we tuck it into a drawer. When the drawer gets so full it cannot close, we tuck the paper into a cardboard box and stick it under the desk. Soon our desks are jammed with paper—underneath, inside & on top.''Good God! You've been spying on me!''Alas, it is what most people's desks look like.''What's the effect of all these unfulfilled bits of paper? What did you call it—potential energy transactions?''I shall tell you. The day comes when you arrive at your desk, and you have lots of work to do, but you can't do it. You feel an incredible amount of inertia. You can't get started. And you have no idea why.''You peeping Tom! You've been staring at me through my office window.''The reason why you can't get started is that your desk is swamped with frozen energy. It is lying there, waiting to be handled. But the inertia infects everything you do, so that you end up unable to do anything.'She shook her head. 'It's awful, but it all rings true. What about computers? I use mostly email these days.''They're just the same. The only difference is that instead of physical letters arriving at your desk, emails arrive in your inbox. Again, each of them is a potential energy transaction. And again, the right thing to do would be to delete each one, or reply to each one—and then delete it. But that's not what we do, is it?''It is not.''We leave them there in our inboxes.'She nodded guiltily. 'And soon there are 600 emails in our inboxes.''800.''And eventually, we select them all and stick them in a file called "archive"—which is simply the computer equivalent of the cardboard box under the desk. And the result is the same. Our email systems become full of frozen energy, & inertia spreads out of it. We find ourselves unable to do any useful work.''I've often wondered why I feel like I am walking in treacle. So what should one do about all this?'Sinha waved a bony index finger at her. 'This is what I recommend. Divide all your paperwork into 2 piles. One of stuff that is useless and should be thrown away. And one of stuff which you think may be of use one day. Then you throw both piles away.''Both piles?''Both piles. By that stage, you will have started to feel the benefits that clarity can bring.''And I suppose one should delete all one's emails as well.''Exactly. Even if you don’t, that nice Mr. Gates has arranged for the computer to crash every few years, so that all your stuff gets wiped out anyway. "
― Nury Vittachi , Mr Wong Goes West
