You may have read this ancient letter.
According to most sources, it would be exactly 500 years old today - written on Christmas, 1513.
According to possibly the most authoritative source, its age - or indeed its author - have been impossible to prove.
Even so - and even if you have read it - perhaps it is time to reread and reread it.
The time is always right for words that carry the beauty and solace of truth.
A Letter to the Most Illustrious the Contessina Allagia Dela Aldobrandeschi,
Written on Christmas Eve Anno Domini 1513
I salute you. I am your friend, and my love for you goes deep.
There is nothing I can give you which you have not. But there is much,
very much, that, while I cannot give it, you can take.
No heaven can
come to us unless our hearts find rest in it today. Take heaven! No
peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present little
instant. Take peace!
The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within
our reach, is joy. There is radiance and glory in darkness, could we but see.
And to see, we have only to look. I beseech you to look!
Life is so generous a giver. But we, judging its gifts by their covering,
cast them away as ugly or heavy or hard. Remove the covering, and you
will find beneath it a living splendor, woven of love by wisdom, with power.
Welcome it, grasp it, and you touch the angel's hand that brings it to you.
Everything we call a trial, a sorrow or a duty, believe me, that
angel's hand is there. The gift is there and the wonder of an
overshadowing presence. Your joys, too,
be not content with them as joys. They, too, conceal diviner gifts.
Life is so full of meaning and purpose, so full of beauty beneath
its covering,
that you will find earth but cloaks your heaven. Courage then to claim
it; that is all! But courage you have, and the knowledge that we are
pilgrims together, wending through unknown country home.
Merry Christmas - or whatever Light, whatever Good, you honour - and the best of the best in the new year.
IF YOU LIKED THIS, YOU MIGHT LIKE:
Greeting to the Unknown Human (and non-human, too)
The title and the exclamation mark notwithstanding, this is not going to a parody, a satire, or even a particularly funny post. It is actually a post about what caused a constantly blinking Wi-Fi button on my DSL modem (it went on for days), when clearly my laptop settings and the ISP were not at fault.
It was malware. Specifically, MySearchResults, which I had downloaded, unwittingly, bundled with some other program - possibly (just possibly) with my beloved PhotoScape.
(And let me tell you, I never EVER download programs from dubious places - usually I use CNET - or install them without scanning them first. So, I am somewhat disappointed in my Avast! for not having picked it up. Still, I am keeping it for the time being.)
I had noticed it in Internet Explorer (which I rarely use), where it presented itself as a default search tab. Naturally, I went to the trouble of removing it, even from the registry - manually, entry by entry.
I thought I was free of MySearch. But then I noticed something else: Internet Explorer didn't respond after removal - and there were odd problems with the internet connection. The machine was telling me I was connected, it couldn't find any trouble with the connection - yet I still couldn't access any webpages.
Furthermore, the system appeared to be more cumbersome, slower than usual (and the laptop is only two months old).
I used to love Spybot Search & Destroy, and used it for more than nine years in a row; but in the past few years I found its quality had deteriorated (maybe I am wrong, but that's my impression).
So I went and downloaded the free edition of MalwareBytes and performed a quick scan.
It came up with more than thirty suspicious entries, including one or two memory processes - and all but one seemed to be related to the defunct (or so I thought) MySearchResults. The remaining one was OpenCandy, which I know came with Photoscape. (Seriously, Photoscape!)
You see, this malware - MySearch - hides itself under generic names in the registry, so it's easy to miss it unless you know exactly what names and places to look for. Which is why I had only partially removed it, but left many entries in the registry that allowed the malware to update itself again and again.
Well, in one clean sweep they were gone. The internet connection works fine. The odd memory problems are gone.
And my Wi-Fi button blinks no more.
