This might come out as insensitive and immature to those of you who’ve breezed through greater ordeals, but even the smallest triplet of losses in quick succession might have one running for spiritual solace.

A quick blow-by-blow:

• Internal hard-drive crash; managed to back up an image to my external hard-drive: May 19, 2011
• External hard-drive crash; no, I didn’t back this up: June 16, 2011
• Firefox crash; cleared my history, and didn’t restore the 23 tabs I had open: July 6, 2011

I’m now staring at a bare Firefox window; I’ve already tried restarting it twice, hallucinating about my tabs magically reappearing. Just two tabs now: one for this post, and another on The Four Noble Truths:

• Life means suffering
• The origin of suffering is attachment
• The cessation of suffering is attainable
• There is a path to the cessation of suffering

Staring at my screen, with flashes of my hard-drives’ last days resonating with the radiation off my chipped spectacles, I can’t help but wonder if Buddha had his share of digital loss.