Having taken over the reauthorisation process from the NGO, we received treatment approval for December 2024 to end May 2025 at the end of September this year, three weeks after receiving the obligatory neurologist’s report.
Systemically, medical aids certainly border on tyrannical, with a strong Kafkaesque atmosphere. But our experience in this bizarre push and pull scenario over the last 18 months offers a crucial caveat, in that our medical aid does not seem to be staffed by people who have lost chunks of their souls to the bureaucratic machine. Now that there is no intermediary muddling I have finally managed to establish the right relationship with the right person, who has been nothing but helpful, and, crucially, informative. Within the operational tyranny are human beings who want to work well, and help other human beings. It’s easy to forget this. There are surely important lessons here, I have told myself many times, about how to navigate the hellscape of general life administration.
Recovery wise, I am finally experiencing pain free flickers. Not full days or anything, not yet, but in many of the crucial motions and movements the back feels steadily stronger and more stable, and the wrenches are of a lower order.
In terms of strength, we are back on the slopes, which was initially (very) challenging, but which is now delivering good returns. We are also – very slowly – starting to head back into the wild, the real world, filled with all its precarious edges and pushy helpful people. The road ahead still looks pretty long, but, after nigh-on six months, it is at least fairly well delineated. One of the biggest challenges has been coming to grips with the fact that in this scenario we haven’t been able to achieve what we crave through effort and gym and intent; and that the many, many, many hours spent flat on my back have been, and continue to be, a vital strength builder.
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In The Matter With Things, psychiatrist, philosopher and polymath Iain McGilchrist proposes the fascinating idea that the natural mode of life is movement, not stasis. By this he means all life - not only living creatures and forests and trees and shrubs, but also rocks and minerals and mountain ranges.
We tend to think of being static as our default position; from which we choose to break free and move, walk, run, get in a car, etc. Before we sit back down. Through an extremely detailed body of neuroscience research, quantum exploration and philosophical reflection, McGilchrist says that all forms of life, and matter, actually want and need to be on the move. Which seems like a pretty bizarre proposal when you look at a mountain range. But which also starts to make a strange kind of sense – even to the layman – when you change the time scale of your view. If you filmed that mountain range with a time-lapse camera over the period of a million years, you would see a huge amount of movement. Ditto for rocks and forests and concrete office blocks.
Robyn and I latched onto this thinking during the year, and started reconfiguring our business. What we do, how we do it, where we do it, and all of that. The returns have been very good – at the level of the business, and also in terms of the way the new focus, and movement, has allowed us to work much more together, in partnership, on the higher level corporate stuff as well as the more relaxed creative side.
The net result has been another curious duality: an intense and fast moving work life, with many pressures and requirements, locked inside a rigid physical routine and daily lifestyle that has, per force, stayed almost exactly the same for some 182 days. Rewarding, for sure, but also challenging in terms of how to manage energy levels, and physical and mental focus. You try to tune in when required, and out when needed, but you don’t always get it right, and the inability to do something tangibly physical to blow off pent up steam means the internal pressures are always high.
Even so, I am grateful to McGilchrist, and all the other thinkers I have been reading during our personal little lockdown. Grappling with the importance of movement – the very idea of it – has allowed us, I think, to take advantage of an important corollary, also put forward by McGilchrist; that the motion of life is powered by a fundamental asymmetry in all things, and experiences. To wit: we crave symmetry and equilibrium and that sense of resting stasis, but it’s the asymmetries that actually power motion, movement, and progress – physically, but also within the infinite reaches of mental and emotional space.
All of the above is, of course, captured and reflected in simple cliches (every cloud…), a Rolling Stones song (you can’t always get what you want…) and many other hard coded modes of human expression I generally tend to brush straight past. Which, when I think about it properly, makes me chuckle. It is surely all of our destinies at various times of life to be forced to dig much deeper than we would like, to end up with a common little truth in our hand, which we forgot to remember was there all along.