Backlog

The February 2017 issue of National Geographic Magazine has an article dedicated to the hundreds of millions of women worldwide who in a staggering number of countries are subjected to incredibly unfair and medieval discrimination and abuse once they become widows. The problem is creepy in its  scope. The small ray of  hope in this dismal situation is that some women are fighting back  and in some cases are able to gain a sympathetic eye and ear of hopelessly outdated laws mired in rigid and biased traditions. There is one double page picture that sums it all up: the view of a room filled from the floor to the ceiling in a young archivist's office in Uganda. The earnest looking man seems dwarfed by the mountains of files all around him. The files are claims to settle property rights of widows, even rights to their own children. The files on the floor and high up by the ceiling are coated in dust and yellowed with time. It is a stunning photograph. The young archivist looks sincere and it is hard to tell from his turned away gaze how he might feel about  the perplexing enormity of his task.
The photograph is spellbinding, in the scope of human tragedy it captures, and the often absurd conditions of life in so many parts of our world. In an effort to catch my breath emotionally, as I delved into the article and its stark stories, a different thought intruded on my mind. How often do we allow backlog in our relationships to overwhelm us to the point where it becomes almost impossible to repair the damage? Every connection we have, whether recent or longstanding, whether it be family, friends, neighbours, lovers, can fall into the backroom archives of our heart and mind, where eventually the dust overcomes the life and vibrancy of the connection, and we just give up.
Relationships take a lot of effort and time to maintain, to keep them dust and cobweb free. Complacence may let us slip the importance of one or another connection closer to the floor, closer to the back of the desk that is our mind, until eventually some relationships vanish all together from our view, stacked somewhere high out of our reach, until we even forget their importance to us. Other relationships come in, and pretty soon they too, with time, if we become careless or distracted, might slip further back. It is a daunting realization. One way to avoid this, is to let our family, friends and neighbours know that they matter, let them know we care, we appreciate what they mean to us, if we want to stop losing people we care about, and realize we let them get covered up like so many papers in a dusty file in a dusty backroom of our hearts and minds.