hrj

[I feel the need to include a preliminary assurance that, although I use certain medical diagnoses as a rhetorical example here, this is not inspired by anything to do with my own body. I'm not that indirect. Really.]

There are things that will eventually take care of themselves just by being left alone. Broken toes and sore backs, the importance of old computer files, what you need to do to fix the final chapter of the novel.

There are things that will only get more critical the longer you ignore them. Dry rot, the cat's litter box, overdue bills, that funny-looking mole, the overlooked container of leftovers in the back of the fridge.

And there are, of course, many things that fall somewhere in between. How do you know when that strange thing your cell phone does means that you're about to get stranded in the middle of nowhere without the ability to call someone for help? Or when it's a temporary glitch that you could spend three days researching and addressing only to have it fix itself?

I started thinking about this issue when my iPhone suddenly stopped having a problem of battery drain. (Yes, suddenly stopped.) Back in January I think it was, starting very abruptly, my phone battery was draining at an annoying rate. The phone would heat up, and I'd need to recharge it one or two times in the middle of the day (rather than it easily running until bedtime), even when I'd closed all the apps and shut down almost all data pulls. The iPad was doing something similar, though not as drastic, so it seemed to be some sort of general issue.

I went online, and sure enough I found recent discussions of people with similar problems, attributing it to some sort of iOS update that didn't play well with certain apps. (Though I hadn't updated either the iOS or any apps recently.) And the consensus was you had to do an encrypted backup, wipe your phone, and reinstall everything, and then magically it would all work like new.

Well. That would take quite a bit of time and work. And it would probably affect how my phone played with the laptop, since I already knew I needed to update all my operating systems, and I was putting that off for when I decided to get a new laptop. So in the mean time, I just got in the habit of plugging the phone into the charger any time I was sitting at my desk, and making sure I had a backup battery pack on me at all times.

And then...one day...without warning...without having done anything...the abnormal battery drain stopped. (This probably means it was something either on the AT&T side or the Apple side that they'd refused to acknowledge to any of the people whose solutions I turned up.) And now I can continue to slide along, waiting for a much more convenient time to upgrade my hardware and software. And all I had to do was have mitigations in place for the short term and wait it out. Of course, I had no idea that would work. The risk was acceptable because I could implement short-term mitigations, and because the worst case scenario was spending an entire weekend wrestling with iPhone backups and restores. Annoying, but not fatal.

To let be.

But what really led me to pick this topic today (because I could let the iPhone story slide just as I'd let the problem itself slide with no real consequence) was a friend reporting on a biopsy result. The sort of biopsy result that you can't let slide. The sort where you're lucky they knew to look for it in the first place, and that they went back for a second when the first one was unexpectedly normal.

To do.

Know the difference between to do and to let be. Know your risks and mitigations. Don't drag yourself down trying to address things that will solve themselves in time. But never look away because you don't feel up to Doing. Sometimes, the most important thing in the world is To Do.