"Reason, I sacrifice you to the evening breeze."
So, I reckon you noticed no morning post. Peg woke up deathly ill, surmised Covid, and sent me out to Walgreen's when I'd normally be writing this to find a rapid antigen test. That came back negative, but her thoughtful boss arranged for some more sensitive test by the pros at Guthrie that came back quite positive. From there I dove into a Zoom mediation while she pretended to feel fine, but by the end of my mediation a couple hours ago she was dead asleep with no prospect of returning to the land of consciousness anytime soon. Peg leads a lot healthier lifestyle than mine, but this whole Covid thing, whether in vaccine form or the real thing, hits her like a freight train. I'm guessing it's the result of having an overexcitable immune system after an adult life spent around really sick people.
So, what to do at the end of a long, billable day? Certainly not more work, although it sits on my conscience in a seemingly inexhaustible supply. Maybe I'll sit on the front porch of Tara like the grizzled old lawyer I am, and enjoy the cool May breeze while savoring a cocktail and listening to the Braves.
And ponder an essay on the LGM blog (I know I said I'd never return, but hey, I'm sort of addictive that way) about why people who don't really need the money stay obsessed with always making a little more:
I'll skip ahead, assuming you've now read the blog post.
Why do I, at 57, continue to obsess every day about my numbers of billable hours, collections for the day, for the year? I save our bookkeeper's weekly financial spreadsheet emails sometimes going two or three years back, have since I was a partner at B&R, always wanting to see if I'm beating the previous year's numbers.
I'm guessing you don't do that.
Our author in the blog hits on the substitution effect, which was my explanation for most of my life when those around me questioned this obsession:
if you are a world-bestriding colossus like Elon Musk, then literally every hour you are indulging in leisure rather working furiously to increase your hundreds of billions is costing you millions of dollars. I mean that’s just math.
I'm no Elon Musk, but during some of the more spiritually and emotionally significant moments in my life--riding the Matterhorn with my sons, fishing on a perfect spring day with friends, patting the arm of a dying parishioner and doing my best at being pastoral--there was always a meter in my mind ticking off the six minute increments I wasn't getting paid to summarize medical records or file a motion to file a motion to file a motion. It's not something of which I'm particularly proud, this inner voice that was shouting at the other beloved person, "You'd realize how special our time together is to me if you knew how much it was costing me to be here."
Yeah, that's kind of unflattering.
And it is a malignancy. The blogger quotes John Maynard Keynes:
The love of money as a possession -as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life -will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semicriminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.
That's true no matter what other explanation one might pose--scorekeeping in an endless game against yourself and your peers, deciding that life wouldn't be entirely complete without three homes that require one's own airplane to manage, or--my personal favorite--"habit trending into obsessive compulsive disorder":
If you live your life as a moneymaking machine you find after awhile that you can’t ever turn it off. Indeed at some point you probably can’t even imagine that would be an option, since making money isn’t what you do, it’s who you are.
A little too close to home, that. I am the sum of my lifetime of billable hours.
And I'm not sure how to feel about the fact that I'm generally pretty happy these days, grinding it out like a thirty-five year old. I lack the epistemological simplicity of religious zeal; getting an enormous bonus check at year's end is meaning enough.
But it's always more complicated than that, isn't it? P and I have developed a relationship with this place in the frozen north that could fairly be described as love, of the people and the land and even the cold when it arrives and we appreciate it for a few days before nodding at one another and jumping into the Columbia to fly south like the geese who abandon this place around the same time. Falling in love with Peg meant a massive risk to that sacred income stream; this means an even bigger risk, I guess.
Peg just woke up and meandered into this beautiful home office she created for me, announcing that her head felt like it was going to explode. I hope not. It's a lovely head.
So much for listening to the Braves. Time to work on helping get her fed, dosed, and comfortably back to bed.
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