Filing It Away

Are filing cabinets becoming obsolete? I still have one next to my desk, but I wonder if such filing cabinets will be necessary in the digital age to come. I suppose everything we need could be filed away on the cloud, or looked up online, but I will always be most comfortable having hard copies of some things. I guess my age is showing.


Sometimes I think my brain resembles an elaborate mega-computer, with a little IT guy inside, working around the clock to make sure everything keeps operating as it should. There are programs that keep my body functioning as it is designed to: my brain keeps my heart beating and my lungs breathing, without pausing, for seven or eight decades, or more. Other programs oversee digestion of the food I eat, and interpretation of my senses of touch and smell. It must take a complex program to decode what my eyes see, turning every moving image right-side-up in a split second and making sense of every bit of data, while my mind determines how my body will react to everything I catch sight of. Yet another program interprets the vast number of sounds I hear everyday, determining which ones I need to address, and which I can ignore.

There seems to be a tiny librarian residing in my brain, as well, maintaining an intricate filing system that changes every waking moment. Information is gathered, sorted, and filed instantaneously, over and over. My poor little librarian never gets a break.

I've read that large organizations use units of storage, called petabytes, to hold massive amounts of computerized data. One petabyte holds 1000 terabytes; that's 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. Did you know that each human brain has memory space of over 2.5 million petabytes? Whew! No wonder my personal librarian has to work ceaselessly to keep up.

Just think: our brains store a wealth of information every day, some of it inconsequential and soon deleted, and some of it stored for a lifetime. Is it any wonder that we sometimes forget people's names, or the location of our phones? It shouldn't be surprising to realize, after 70 years or so, that some things are simply misfiled or lost. And the more information we take in, through our educations and experiences, the more likely it is that some things will inevitably vanish entirely from our brains' filing systems, never to surface again.


So, the older we get, it is to be expected that the little librarians in our brains are aging, too, and are unavoidably misfiling and discarding information that we would rather keep close at hand. After all, those filing systems in our brains are getting full, jam-packed with the data of a lifetime. Is it any wonder that we aren't always able to retrieve the data we are seeking?

At least, "That's my story and I'm sticking to it."

I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well.
Psalm 139:14

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