Sweet Grace

As an AIDS-infected roughneck in Dallas Buyers Club, Matthew McConaughey storms out of the hospital when doctors tell him he has only 30 days to live. Later, he gets a flash of recognition while reflecting on where he might have contracted the infection. That’s what one gets for raging like a bull in life’s China shop.

Now, only by lassoing the bull, both literally and figuratively, does McConaughey redeem his remaining years with sweet grace discovered under pressure. But the resulting saga is not for the faint-hearted. For most parts, prevention remains a better option than cure.

A study of the Kungsholmen community in Sweden found that a healthier lifestyle added as many as seven years to a middle-aged individual’s life. Even 85-year olds reaped the bonus of four more years that healthy habits added to their lifespan, doctors found. But many people do not value their blessings sufficiently or they tend to discount them. That might explain why prevention is not more popular than the “no-stops-carousal” approach to living and making merry. This is because the benefits of prevention are often invisible and, therefore, underappreciated. Also, we all tend to harbour a positive bias in favour of Eros.

Without it, with all our awareness of Death or Thanatos, we might have thrown in the towel long ago: as a famous poem by Anna Akhmatova asks, Why then do we not despair?, when “Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold (and) Death’s great black wing scrapes the air/ misery gnaws to the bone…/ And the miraculous comes so close to the ruined…”