The week of Thanksgiving Holiday, 2009, finds us in a thankful frame of mind indeed. What started out as a year to just get through: the Financial Panic of a lifetime doing a not-atypical number on our retirement nest egg, the loss of a job at the very nadir of that crisis, a regime change at the seat of federal power that promised Change in the direction of profligate collectivism, and by some measures the worst drought ever here in South Central Texas. It ended being an opportunity to stand among those investors who were financially and emotionally prepared to make the proverbial bet against the end of the world and profit accordingly. Financial independence is within reach, if not quite firmly grasped. A semblance of gainful employment has, in fits and starts, started to take shape. The once ominous HopeNChange Express barely made it out of the garage before the engine started smoking and sputtering, the wheels started coming off and the pit crew started making like to slit each others’ throats. The drought has recently given way to a series of rainstorms which in turn unleashed a torrent of photosynthesis and concomitant vegetative activity. So gratitude towards whoever or whatever might be keeping things from collapsing into a cosmic scrap heap, that wellspring of Love that seemingly countervails ubiquitous Entropy, comes easily to mind.
With this in mind, it should not be surprising that this week’s meditation came to be. I had been working on a new investment idea. It is a company that holds the high ground with respect to the technology of controlling heat, pressure and so ultimately rates of flow for large scale processes like oil refining. This company designs and manufactures highly engineered equipment, which is to say that while there may be a certainly simplicity to the designs, each system has to be attuned to local conditions in order to achieve consistent and optimal performance. What struck me was that it is also designed to operate for upwards of twenty years, not unlike the aviation equipment that has been such a focus over so much of my working life. In both instances, a very large installed base has been put in place, to the degree that the need to replace equipment reaching the end of its economic life is a big part of what drives prospective demand. As I pondered what that might look like over the next few years and started putting dates to things, it occurred to me that this “replacement demand” will be driven by the retirement of equipment that was being installed or even designed early in my working life. Indeed, I can remember when the aircraft whose looming retirement is expected to drive demand for “next generation” models like the Boeing 787 was the “next generation”. Now, part of this apparent obsolescence is due to design advances. We also know the outliers as to how long well-engineered equipment can be kept running, but we also know that it takes a great deal of special, and often expensive, care and attention to do so. We see some evidence to the contrary, but they tend to be relatively simple, though still marvelously engineered, piles of stone, like pyramids and aqueducts. Even a modicum of complexity in a pile of stone will eventuate in the need for a great deal of expensive attention to keep it from falling down, such as the cathedral we were able to visit in Cologne early this year. Equipment might be made with the most durable of materials, but however well designed it is, operating in any but the most hermetically benign environment, it still eventually wears out. And it does so at a rate which does not compare favorably with human beings.
Here I am at the midpoint of my sixth decade, certainly not made of the most durable of materials and fully aware that in another 55+ years my frame will be dust. In at least a few respects, this seemingly highly engineered system is not operating at that peak efficiency denoted by youth, but compared to the aforementioned examples which are at the apex of humanity’s best efforts, it is doing quite well. The idea of clocking an unbroken string of sub-6- minute miles is certainly a thing of the distant past (Hell, just having to run a mile is not something I want even think about), but I can still from time to time get to a tennis ball that everyone else on the court thought was gone. My eyes certainly need a lot of help, but can still make out amazing things when they know what to look for, like that whiteness on the inside of the mouth of a feeding trout that is otherwise marvelously well camouflaged. The list of things that still work but not quite like they used to could go on, but let’s not go there! What is amazing, if you stop and think about it, is that we were designed to operate as well as we do for as long as so many of us have.
It is miraculous that we are as self-repairing as we are. Many of us enjoy seeing antique equipment, planes, cars, locomotives, etc. being operated. In many cases, even with antiques houses, these remarkable testaments to craftsmanship are very nearly devoid of their original material. With us, a similar process takes place without our even thinking about. Wound repair, immune systems that continue to provide scientists with more questions than answers, memory and especially that prosaic miracle we call sleep, all designed into a system to keep it running even longer than a KC-135 (which certainly doesn’t repair itself!) This is not to say that a disregard, willful or imposed by circumstance, for basic preventative maintenance (i.e., calories consumed should approximate calories burned, sleep when needed) or any number of manifestations of evil will not preclude an expectation that which attributed to Moses over 3000 years ago: “The length of our days is seventy years, or eighty if we have the strength.” (Psalm 90:10). It should, however, remind us that we are fearfully and wonderfully made.
This ancient observation bespeaks yet another layer to the beneficence of Providence in our day. Not only do we seem to be designed for 50+ years of relatively low maintenance functionality, we have also been blessed with an unlocking of knowledge which is pushing the envelope on that Psalmist’s observation. For example, the pain management provided by opiates and variously rendered ethanol concoctions was only supplanted about 100 years ago by mass produced salicylic acid (a.k.a, aspirin), which has in turn been supplanted by a host of successor compounds. But more to the point, the technology to provide “repair” against all manner of upsets, even as our designed=in repair sub-systems wear down, has exploded in our lifetimes. Case in point, the immediate progenitors of the fearfully and wonderfully made system that has been the object of this meditation, i.e., my parents. Both of them are nearing the end of their ninth decade, and both have been in for repairs. But one still drives all over the country to look at birds through eyes that had cataracts several years ago, helped along by a remarkably unobtrusive hearing aid. The other maintains airplanes and flies one of them almost every week, when he is not busy growing grapes to make outstanding (i.e., Best of Show at the Western Washington State Fair more than once) wine. This workload is easier to bear than it was a decade ago, thanks to a pair of titanium knee-joints. What a blessing to live in a time when access to such life extending technology is scarcely remarked (although the prospect of placing more of the dead hand of government on this body of innovation is deservedly being remarked upon!).
2009 was a year of great suffering and setback. The Psalmist goes on, “ ...yet their span is but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away.” Trouble and sorrow have been more in evidence of late than many of us have been accustomed. Yet there is so much to ameliorate that, so much to be grateful for. A look at History, just about anywhere you choose to peek behind its curtain and into what troubled our ancestors, should make you thankful for the troubles we have as opposed to the troubles we could be having. Happy Thanksgiving!
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