Survivor
Monday November 15, 2021
It’s been a long time since the last blog, or it seems that way to me. Post-pandemic supply chain disruptions have thrown my work life into something of a frenzy. The days filled with meetings and zoom calls, the flood of emails overflowing from my desk onto my laptop, and into my phone. I have a good team, and they in turn have a solid group of vendors and logistics partners.
Still, there is a more-or-less ever-present sense that we are overlooking something. That while we are sandbagging one side of the road, flood waters are undermining the embankment on the other. Looking back, will we say either ‘why didn’t we notice that earlier, in time to do something about it?’ or ‘why did we expend so much frantic effort on what was ultimately, in retrospect, a lost cause?’?
In any case, is that the correct way to punctuate a sentence, with so many question marks?
Maybe it’s time to build an ark, or at the very least arise and go now to Innisfree and plant nine rows of beans.
Or write a blog.
Some weeks ago, or possibly months, my eye fell on a headline which I thought at the time might make good blog fodder. A scientific study had linked the consumption of more than 6 cups of coffee per day to smaller brain mass and possibly the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. (I have an ongoing interest in the health impact of coffee, being a person who brews a pot for breakfast and leaves a trail of discarded paper cups through the remainder of the day.)
Ha, I said. Typical. Correlation is not causation. Clearly people with smaller brain mass obviously require more coffee to function, and as to the Alzheimer’s sufferers, likely they simply lose track of how many cups they have consumed!
Ever since Isaac Newton observed that an object at rest stays at rest until acted upon by a force, and that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, the mechanistic language of cause and effect has colored much of western thought.
But the interactions of inanimate objects are hopelessly inadequate to describe the behavior of systems of living organisms. Unlike the clock that winds down and the machine which wears out, living systems do not simply trend toward a state of lesser energy and greater entropy.
All around us, tiny cells are converting carbon dioxide and water into carbohydrates, plants are structuring primitive molecules into ever more complex patterns, branching and reaching toward the sunlight and deep into the earth. Animals are eating these plants and each other, digesting carbohydrates, producing proteins, procreating, proliferating, and in some cases pontificating.
What can you say? Clearly any attempt to make sense of the world of living organisms is far beyond the scope of this blog.
However, once again, science has gifted us with a handy short-hand. Charles Darwin took his notebooks to the Galapagos islands, and returned with a crisp observation: all of life is in competition for finite resources. Everything we need to know can be summarized by the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’.
I think about the dynamics of growth, the unintended consequences of government intervention, searching for a narrative arc that ties coffee to Newton to Darwin to post-pandemic supply chain disruption, waiting for a few spare hours to squeeze in a blog-writing session.
Suddenly we get a call. Your mother has been taken to hospital with a suspected heart attack. We throw together a few clothes, the laptop, the phone. Drive down to Walden. My wife heads to the emergency room. My dad and I make soup, wait for news.
The next weeks are a swirl of activity punctuated with long periods of waiting. Two heart specialists are investigating the causes of intermittent episodes of extremely high blood pressure. As my mom describes it, one of them is a plumber, the other is an electrician. The plumber determines that there is no blockage and she is released from hospital.
The electrician continues to investigate.
The far-flung family sends encouraging messages, phones, visits.
As the days progress, my mother’s friends begin to drop by her bedroom one by one. They call her ‘granny’. Children, old ladies, people with mental illness, lonely, misfits. They share a cup of tea, a joke, a memory, an anecdote.
She is part of a web of mutual support. People with whom she shares interests in crafts. People with whom she shares history. Fragile people with whom she shares her time and her generosity of spirit.
My mother is not a strong person. At least not in the way we typically think of strength. Her body bears the scars of cancer surgery and knee replacements. Her psyche bears the scars of one who has worn their heart on their sleeve their entire life and has taken insufficient precautions to protect it from the wounds of love.
And yet she has an incredible tenacity. She loves life and holds on with a fierce grip. As she says ‘I’m going to celebrate life one day at a time!’
Whatever else you may say, she is a survivor.
