Being useful is calming. When you need to become the pillar of strenght, it just seems to happen naturally.

It has almost been a week since I came back home. Being away for three weeks was too long, and its effects were apparent. My wife, a tough cookie herself, was completely exhausted from trying to balance a heavy workload with taking care of our little girl. She just started a new rotation, which means that she is up at 5 am and out the door, and is seldom seen back home until after 7 pm. And she is also taking calls again. For example today, she was off to work at 7 am, and won't be back until noon tomorrow. Having probably gotten no sleep at all.

I can admit to having been a bit sleep-deprived myself when I came home last Sunday night, but it is interesting how you can suddenly gain extra strength just from seeing that your force is in demand. So I have spent the week waking up with my wife and seeing her off, getting a couple of hours worth of work done before my daughter wakes up, feeding/dressing/brushing her teeth and driving her to the daycare, paying bills, haggling with oil people/phone people/repair people, getting the cars maintained, studying, stocking the fridge/pantry, working some more, fetching my little girl and playing with her, buying flowers/wine/other distractions for my wife, making dinner, feeding and nourishing my wife, bathing my girls and putting them to bed, and maybe getting a little more work done.

And I've done it. Calmly and completely. Because I am wanted. And needed. By a couple of people that live in my heart. One of them moved there a decade ago. The other one just appeared there last summer. Yesterday, I was struggling with the question 'Can you miss something you've never actually had?' Today I realized that of course you can. If you realize that it is something you have wanted for longer than you have known. My little girl, for example. Being apart from her for a few days soon after she was born made me miss her like crazy. Even if we only just met. Missing her was also missing the opportunity to get to know her better. To verify what I felt she was like. Or maybe learning something completely different about her. This was the challenge of being away from her, these last few weeks. It is the loss of time. Seeing it disappearing without being there to spend it with her.

But now I am back. And I am making good things happen. My daughter greeted me as if I had been away for only a few minutes, and I hope she didn't feel this sting in her heart that comes from missing dearly. But I secretly also want to believe that she missed me, a bit. Just a little. Isn't that the essence of human relations? You do not just want to enjoy the company of other people. You also want to know that it is reciprocated. That there is balance. That you are not just feeding on others, but that they are getting good things in return from you.

This may be my single, greatest dread about my little girl growing up, besides her becoming a 'socially conservative' Repulican. It is that she will not derive the same pleasure from my company as I do from hers. Which actually is pretty likely, eventually, I guess, even inevitable. I even want her to outgrow me, and us, her parents. But I know it is going to break my heart when she starts trying to break free.

Oh, listen to me! How silly. Worrying about her moving out, when she has barely moved in. As I am writing this, she is sound asleep after a challenging night and morning. Late last night, she woke up and started crying. Something she practically never does during the night. When I checked on her, she was miserable. Eyes red and puffed, nasty cough, and what a runny nose! How can such a little thing produce so much snot?

She woke up a few more times in the night, and each time I put her right back to sleep. My wife took her with her downstairs for breakfast before she left, but the little critter hardly ate anything. She spent most of the morning whimpering pathetically in my arms, eating and drinking a little from time to time, finally collapsing into exhaustion on my shoulder. I know it is a terrible thing to say, but there is something so endearing about her when she is this feeble. Probably because that is when all she really wants is to be carried around and cuddled.

Which gives my a reason to be comforting. An excuse to be strong.

This is the hour, at which the World changed. I saw it happen. We all did.

I had a lot on my mind when I picked up my daughter yesterday afternoon. Since she is currently experimenting with switching from two naps during the day to just one, she tends to be much more serene when I pick her up than when I drive her in the mornings. So she is content with just gazing at the trees and houses, as they hurry along past our car.

My thoughts were bobbing around in my head, rascally. Brushing aside my every plea for them to fall in line and allow me to think them through one at a time, in an orderly fashion. Suddenly, I was roused by a voice. It was my daughter. Talking. She told me not to worry so much. The rain had stopped, she said, and the sun was wrestling with the clouds. She pointed to a hill that we drive by every day. Take me there, dad, she said. Take me to the top of the hill.

So we drove up the hill. Funny how you can drive by a place for years without really noticing it. Until one day, when someone opens your eyes and there it is. While we were driving up the winding road, my little girl told me of the adventures that had taken place on that hill. The bravery, the heartaches, and the happy everafters. Once we had parked the car, she took me by the hand and led me to the peak of the little hill. See, dad, she said. From here you can see to the end of the world. Over there, you have the strange mountains, where the trolls and goblins live. And over there, she pointed, is where the elves and fairies dance around in the fields all night long. And oh! Look at that. A straw! She proceeded to taste this irresistible delicacy, sucking the nectar from its thin body. I sat down. And looked around. You really could see the whole world from up here. If you just opened your eyes.

After a while, my little girl looked back up at me. "Dah!", she said enthusiastically and smiled. I smiled back and patted her on the head. "Dah?", she said again, more slowly. Her smile faded. My brief moment of understanding her language had passed. She sighed. The labors of educating parents. Two steps forward. One step back.

It has been raining non-stop since yesterday afternoon. I even heard the wind blowing when I woke up in the middle of the night. And the wind hardly ever visits this place. Rain and wind and darkness. It reminded me of home.

I sat down by the window and stared out into the darkness. The light from the street lamps reflected in small puddles of water, scattered around on the road. Even though I knew it was mild outside, the sound of the wind made it feel so cold. Mostly because this time of year, I am usually heading back home to take part in the yearly driving of the sheep, down from their summer grazing on the mountains.

This is the time of big, waxed parkas. Of thick wool-sweaters. Creaky saddles. Old riding boots. Bad-tasting cigarettes. Mending bridles. Getting re-acquainting with the horses.

You drive up there from the city. An hour and a half. It used to be two to three hours. Half a day. Now it's all asphalt, and new, shorter roads. Kind of takes a bit of the charm out of the trip. But then, it has all lost its shine in so many ways. There are no thousand sheep to be found there. No thirty good horses to choose from. The houses are not fresh and all-white anymore. Bustling with people. So many have grown up or grown old and died, and not that many have replaced them.

I spent my summers up there. Eight until fourteen. Actually, the first year I only stayed a week, I think. But what a week. You see, I grew up surrounded by women. Older sisters. Aunts. My mother and grandmother. So I was leading a pretty sheltered life. And then I got sent to this place. I didn't want to go, naturally. Everything was big. And scary. Rough characters and pretty tough work, for a kid. When the farmer's nephew drove me up there, the summer I turned ten, he stopped by the side of the road as soon as he was out of the jurisdiction of the city police, and mixed a flask of moonshine and coca-cola to sip on. Made him drive the rest of the way a hell of a lot faster. He also used to wake up the working hands – that would be me and a handful of other boys – by standing in the stairs below our bedroom and yelling "Rise, hookers, ship!" You get the picture.

But I quickly became fond of the place. Sure you got banged up a bit. Some tumbles, cuts and bruises. Most of them to your ego. But it built character. It really did. Because you could feel that, despite their roughness, the people there still did give a damn. And they were larger than life. The farmer was a seven-foot tall giant of a man, especially in the eyes of a scragly boy. He always wore these strange, thick denim pants, made by his sister. Designing clothes was not her strongpoint. The pants only augmented the farmer's uneven image. But then this was contrasted by how well read he was. The farm had a fairly-sized library. As was common on a farm of this size. Roughly 5-7000 titles. Many of them were cheap thrillers. And sappy love stories. But a large portion of it were real books. And the range was impressive. Mill, Faulkner, Kierkegaard, Joyce, Steinbeck, Ibsen, Shakespeare, Lagerlöf, Twain, Eliot, Blixen, Dostoyevsky, and Laxness. Lots of Laxness. And the farmer seemed to have read them all. You could be standing on a rocky hill, trying to hold a fence post straight in the everblowing wind, while he pounded it into the ground with an over-sized, two handed hammer. If it didn't go fast enough, he would maybe mumble a few obscene curses, and then break into a poem by Byron. Impressive. Then he was libel to follow it up with some foul and often badly-constructed limericks of his own. Not as impressive. He was a chronic asthma patient, but still persisted in running a large farm, spending most of his summers gasping for breath while haying. So he was a true contradiction in terms. An enigma.

After leaving for school in the fall, we would always return for a day in late September for the sheep roundup. A group of men would have set off, a few days earlier, into the mountains on horses for a two-day journey, to gather the sheep that had been grazing there over the summer. They would drive them down to the valley, to a large common area. There, each farmer would have his group of kids to draw his sheep from the sea of animals. It was always quite a sight, seeing the mostly white droves pouring down the sides of the mountains. And it could be hard work, drawing these stubborn sheep, more than half your size, by their horns or heads.

After my last summer there, when I turned fourteen, I was finally invited to join the men, as they set off for the mountains. It was as undramatic as anything connected with the place. I was just told, as I left for the summer, that I would need to show up three days earlier for the roundup since I would be joining the men that fall. That was it.

There were four of us heading up from the farm I had worked on. Each one had a pair of well-rested horses, and a saddlebag with a few sandwiches, a thick slice of blood sausage, and a bottle of milk. We started our ascend at first light, about six o'clock. This early, even the wind is not awake yet. We floated lazily up the neck of the mountain, along the canyon, where the river tirelessly pushed itself down one waterfall after the other. As we reached the shoulder, the wind had picked up, and it began to rain. After reaching the middle of the moor, around mid-day, we ate quietly, and then split up. As we parted, one of the other men reached over and stuffed a package of cigarettes and a box of matches into my coat pocket. "You'll need it", he said, and rode away.

And then there were just the four of us. Me, the two horses, and this pack of cigarettes. In a hall of mountains, with nothing but the plateau between you and the blue ridges on the horizon, you quickly realize your solitude. Your independence. Your responsibility. And then it gets really, really cold. That's where the cigarettes come in. I had practically never smoked before. Except for the requisite odd one behind school during recess, just to see what it tasted like. So I spent the first part of this journey green in the face. But there was something so fitting in inhaling these toxic fumes, right there where everything is pure and unspoilt. I was like this little locomotion, chugging through the swamps and over the hills, spewing smoke and yelling at the sheep that crossed my path. And it became a part of it. Each year since, I began my trip by searching out a Russian troller, docked in the city harbor. By then, I was working there during the summers anyway, so, like everybody else there, I became adept at avoiding the customs officers. The sailors were always stocked with cheap vodka and bad tobacco. They would exchange a few packets of these horrid, strange cigarettes for a single-use, plastic lighter. Not only was the tobacco foul-tasting, but most of the cigarette was comprised of a narrow, cardboard-like cylinder. Therefore, each cigarette didn't even contain that much tobacco. This suited me fine, because I could feel that I would easily start smoking for real, if I started to like the taste, and I didn't want to do that. I just wanted a way to have my smoke while on these sheep rounding journeys. Sadly, after Russia started to crawl to its feet economically, fewer and fewer of their trollers would show up. And when they did, their vodka wasn't cheap anymore and they brought no more Russian cigarettes to sell. So I turned to filterless Camels. It wasn't the same, but it was rough enough, and tasted almost as bad.

The rounding is in ten days. Which means that they will probably head up a week from now. I know that I will not hear from them. Just as certainly as I know that if I were to show up there, they would have found two horses for me to ride.

It is an adjustment, being back here. Instead of no time and an overload of human contact, busily scurrying through days filled with meetings and conferences, I am suddenly in a vacuum of ample time and minimal company during the day.

I did get a ray of sunshine on my doorstep this morning. Two songbirds unexpectedly appeared from their new habitat up in Canada. Welcome back! I can only infer that they missed me so much that they dashed southwards as soon as I came home. Well, that's my theory anyway.

But the working alone and not being buried in slipping deadlines has meant that I have been drowning my friends in e-mails and phonecalls. I realized that this morning, and am consciously taking a step back.

Besides, what is the point of having a lot of time for yourself if you don't use it for yourself?

And with that, he went out biking again. Having blissfully forgotten the aches and pains that he experienced after yesterday's biking expedition.

I have discovered that my quadriceps are a few numbers too big. Not only does my circulation have a big problem pumping enough blood into them when I am working out, but when they really take off, the rest of my body can't keep up.

After blogging my Deep Thought Of The Day (or Month) earlier today, my mind was racing. So I decided to go out and bike it off. Big mistake. Overenthusistic biking after more than a month's hiatus yielded disastrous results. I came back an hour later somewhat dizzy, my back aching, face sunburnt, knees fuming and hands trembling. Only the blessed quadriceps said "Come on! Whatsamatterwithya! Keep going, you lazy gits!" Understandably, my thighs are now the least popular among my body parts.

The toes still reign supreme: Always calm and composed, neatly laid out, keeping the rest of the body in balance.

OK, I need to go to bed.

While on my trip, I got a call from an old colleague of mine. He wanted to "do lunch".

I had almost forgotten how attorneys "do lunch". I haven't practiced law in almost five years, and the mellow world of consulting had dulled the memory of it.

First of all, you show up late.
Secondly, you arrive talking on your cell phone. Throughout the meal, the phone should ring constantly. A sidenote on the phone etiquette: Answer each call with snyde remarks or ironfisted arguments, delivered with malevolence. Every call must end in a "victory", preferably leaving someone maimed, somewhere.
Thirdly, strive to show how much better you are doing in the rat race than your lunch company is. Talk about the length of your new boat. Your newest SUV. Your big summer house.
And finally: Just, whatever you do, do not talk about how you are feeling. I mean really feeling. No talking about your dreams, your anxieties or, God forbid, your love. Don't mention your children, except in passing, and never, ever admit that you would really like to spend more time with them.

In short, be the cold, heartless bastard that people expect a trial lawyer to be. Because how else can you protect yourself from those that are out to get you?

Yes, how indeed.

First off, it has to be said that there are many fields of the law where practicing does not require abandoning your humanity. You have these more tranquil spaces where court battles resemble tea parties. At least compared to where the stakes are routinely high.

This colleague of mine commented that I seemed to have lost my ruthlessness. I don't think he meant that as a complement. The remark was delivered in a sad tone, almost with remorse. I kind of shrugged it off at the time, but it got me thinking.

And I have been thinking about it.

Maybe I have changed. At least I would like it if it meant that fewer people think I am a cold-hearted bastard. Yes, I have done things in the past, especially professionally, which I probably would do differently today. But why?

I didn't have time until now to figure this out. This morning when I woke up, with a slight touch of hangover, it dawned on me, I think.

I have, probably mostly unconsciously, stopped bothering with people that are bad. Yes, I know. No-one is all-bad. And I totally believe that (note that I did not believe that a few years ago). I need to believe that. But I mean 'bad' as in 'having seriously bad intentions' or 'wanting to hurt someone'. The world is full of people that choose to live that way, and I simply do not have time in my short life to spend on them. Which would explain some drastic career moves a few years ago. And my choice of friends. Cold people do not interest me. At least not anymore. I am stuck on good people. Those of beautiful hearts. And especially those that try to hide that beauty with a rough presence, boorishly brushing you away, desperatly trying to keep from getting exposed, hurt. They may be quiet, they may be loud, but they do not tell you things they do not mean. This kind I am drawn to. Hopelessly. It is their charm that leaves me defenseless. Maybe because after getting past the defense mechanism, I feel I get a truer, more honest response. Or maybe because their trust is unconditional, once earned. And that honors me.

Now you may ask: But can you divide between the wicked and the guarded? The bad and the badly behaved? Aren't we all the same? No! We are not. There are corrupt people in this world, people that want to do bad. They want to hurt. They enjoy inflicting pain. Revel in the misery they cause to others. I have to believe they still have the potential to be otherwise, but that side of them has more often than not been silenced a long time ago. So they thrive on dominating other people, in some form or another. And that is evil, pure and simple.

On the other hand, you have the rough ones. The attitute ones. The 'I don't give a flying ... what you think' ones. Why are they so defiant? It is simple, really. For the most part, they crave justice. And freedom. For all. They loathe pretense. And stupidity. And flashiness. And kow-towing to the norm, just because others do it. Anything that sounds like 'that's not proper' does not fly with them. In short, anything without a heart turns them off. So they react. And that puts them in a dilemma. And here is the fundamental difference: They care. They really do not want to hurt. They derive no pleasure from inflicting pain. But they still have this defence mechanism, which can catch people off-guard, even stun them. And they may have longings, dreams, desires which clash with the life they are leading. The corrupt would not give it a second though. But the pure of heart would. They desperately do not want to hurt. Hence the dilemma.

I guess hindsight is always 20/20. Looking back, I think I see myself slowly turning from a professionally banausic existence towards adopting a truly libertarian disposition, shouldering my responsibility as a human being to change this world for the better, instead of expecting other people, or the government, or just anybody else to do it for me. My contribution may be small, but my heart is true. And to take this journey with me, I have chosen the best people. The good. The righteous. The kind.

I just made the best damn risotto I've ever made. At least according to those who ate it. The recipe has been demanded, and so I deliver.

There is just one caveat: It has to be made con mucho amore. Just sprinkle that stuff liberally all over and all through the cooking. You will consequently need to start the enterprise with your heart filled with love. Otherwise it won't become magical. The more love, the better the results. So fill up your hearts, and start cooking:

• Boil a liter of chicken stock and then lower to a simmer. The good stuff, if you have it, otherwise the cubes (e.g. Knorr).
• Finely chop a large onion (white or red) and a few cloves of garlic. Don't press the garlic, mince it.
• Heat in a pan a couple of tablespoons of olive oil and a few of butter.
• Slowly heat the onion and garlic in the butter/oil till they are soft, but don't allow them to turn yellow/brown.
• Pour in a large cup of arborio rice and turn up the heat. Stir from time to time, but not constantly.
• In a minute the rice will turn clear.
• Pour in a couple of glasses of cheap, good, white wine
• Stir a few times, till the wine has all but evaporated/absorbed.
• Mix in as much prosciutto as you think you can eat/afford.
• Turn the heat down and pour one ladle of stock at a time over the rice, stirring a bit until almost absorbed and then adding another ladle.
• Continue until most of the stock is finished, preferably about 15-20 minutes.
• Stick 10-15 of the biggest scallops you can find, and afford, here and there into the rice.
• Take pan off heat, smother in finely grated real parmesan and mix lightly together.
• Put lid on pan and let stand for a couple of minutes.
• Find prey and release on the risotto, thus turning them into everlasting, obedient slaves.
• Continue on to world domination.

I am loved. And it is reciprocated.

And that is a damn good feeling.