Catching Up — Caught Up

A short while (from a week to three weeks) ago, I passed a few milestones without noticing. That I've only just noticed testifies to how unimportant those milestones really are, and also to the kind of comments I do notice and think about. Here are two examples.

Many of my clothes have turned ten years old. I know this because I used to think about tailoring that would last, and got a lot of pieces done. I had no idea they'd last this long. And they still fit well, perhaps even better now that they've subtly shifted to accommodate my frame.

My income has quietly reached my average annual income for the past five years, but in only eight months. That's strange, because I don't recall working harder. And I haven't raised my charges either.

I am very thankful. This is not a milestone. I am grateful all the time, and I give thanks because I am.

Downtime Day 0

It is Thursday morning and you turn on the machine that is amanuensis and secretary, in altogether too many senses of these words. And... there is a terrible lack of response.

This then is Downtime Day 0, D-Day, the day dedicated to the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, who comes upon you riding a blue horse, with the vagaries of electromagnetic chaos in his hand. This is not what you were brought up to believe, but is what you have learnt while walking the narrow corridors of invisible light.

And thus has D-Day come, and the last trump has sounded for your trusty hard disk drive of a decade's faithfulness. For at the heart of every HDD is MTBF — the buried seed of betrayal that always sweeps away the faithful history of duty. MTBF — Mean Time Between Failures. MTBF, which stands for many other things best not said here.

This is D-Day, and where Hell is, there we must ever be, Faustian in all our downfall, lost without our digital dominion. Or so the playwrights would have it.

Yet this is not altogether true:

What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable Will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield:
And what is else not to be overcome?

I decide to take the day off. I will remember — these days were made for man, not man for such days. And I will be at peace.

Altruism and Endeavour

I used to be a public servant. At that time, I calculated that I earned something like $1 per client per hour. Fortunately, clients came in groups of 30 or so. Even so, I received what I thought was a useful wage but one far from a professional one.

Time passed. I became a private operative. In terms of professional development, I got better (which you can interpret how you will).

I can now bill more than a hundred times the per client per hour rate. I have fewer clients but even so, I still am earning a few hundred percent more than I used to, on an hourly basis. And I can make use of my time more effectively in terms of my other life-goals and work-in-life balance.

But what to do when the public sector wants me to help out? For lawyers, there is often a pro bono element of public service; surprisingly, doctors have this too. But my own murky profession is one which every adult human being seems to think they can do — some think of it as a general human function that needs no specialist training. They are aghast when I present my bill, and they point out that some members of other professions don't charge so much.

I was heartened to see a healthy debate in the local press recently, concerning a surgeon who purportedly or allegedly charged way above the going rate for a wide range of highly specialised services. From my somewhat cloistered experience, I cannot imagine charging anyone so much, or that such charges can be justified. Of course, I could be wrong.

Over the last few years, I have come to realise that I too provide highly specialised services. Actually, I estimate that there must be about not more than 20 people in this state who can provide such services; not all of them are available or as easy to find. In fact, I suspect that the number is considerably smaller in practice.

As the Good Book says, "The workman is worthy of his hire," and, "Do not muzzle the ox when he is treading out the grain." I have therefore come to a position that includes an element of means testing: if my clients can pay without ceasing, I will accept that situation and charge a rate which is of benefit to me as well as to them, but is not artificially depressed; if my clients cannot afford this kind of standard rate, I will be altruistic and try to accommodate their situation by artificially depressing my costs and resulting fees as far as I can.

A truly grand endeavour is based on hard work and intense effort without token of reward apart from the pleasure of a job well done. However, a living must still be made, because it creates a sense of contract and collaboration in the professional community. This is why communities have traditionally always 'settled a living' upon the religious in their midst.

And that is why, absent a similar modern sensibility, I have to carve my pound of flesh (and blood) from the body politic. I don't do public service pro bono because (unlike many lawyers) I can't afford to upgrade my professional knowhow and maintain my current comfortable-but-not-luxurious lifestyle if I were to do that. But I do make a concession for those who labour in similar fields, because that too breeds amity and mutual respect.

Losing Face

I have a terrible hypertrophy of the jaw muscles. It has taken some years of unconscious jaw-clenching, but finally, I have noticed the bulges that result from that practice.

It is bad that I have learnt these things too late. My face is stretched and malformed by the kind of artificial patience that owes nothing to natural temperament and too much to the capacity to grin and bear it. My stiff upper lip is not British, but from brygmoidal pain.

Similarly, my stiff-necked behaviour comes from trying to remain unbowed beneath the burdens of the world. Since I noticed this, I've learnt to be more humble. Bowing the head is preferable to breaking the neck.

And so, slowly, my face has sagged into anonymity. Life is good.

The Gospel of Food

I'm sitting for my allotted 45 minutes in the storm-darkened shadow of my small room, reading the latest Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. Volumes 1190 and 1191 have just arrived in the mail. It is Volume 1190, Foods for Health in the 21st Century: A Roadmap for the Future, that has my attention now.

One of the papers is by de Vere White, Hackman and Kugelmass. It's about the belief that about 33% of all cancers can be prevented with a healthy lifestyle and appropriate diet. And it points out that there is largely no specific evidence, despite many claims, that a particular food will help with a particular cancer. Worse is the tendency to extract what is seen as the key chemical compound and consume pills of it — a reductionist practice that can actually lead to bad outcomes.

Here is what we do know: don't be overweight, don't be sedentary, eat a low-calorie diet with especially low amounts of fats and sugars. Here is what else we know: human genetic backgrounds are hugely varied, a healthy diet costs 10x more than an unhealthy one, humans like pills because they're less troublesome than lifestyle changes.

We also know that dietary supplements are mostly untested, that the studies testing them are poor, based mainly on correlation rather than mechanism of causation. We know that what is good in a raw fruit can turn deadly when concentrated in a pill minus the fruit's other contents. Lastly, we know that what reduces the risk of one cancer can raise the risk of another.

So what should we do?

The Good Book says, "Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? ... Who of you, by worrying, can add a single hour to his life?"

That is very good advice, and looking better each day.