Above all else

My dad keeps some small lobsters in his fish tank. One of them recently molted, leaving behind an almost complete shell, and he was puzzled as to how the lobster gets out of its old shell so cleanly.  So I looked it up and showed him the video of how it happens.  Pretty amazing. I then remembered this other thing I'd recently seen, which was about the lesson that lobsters teach us about growth.  The lobster essentially goes through continuous growth all of its life.  But because the shell is hard, it can't just keep growing.  The lobster's flesh becomes increasingly packed within the constricting shell, and it eventually has to shed its old shell before it can continue growing.  Apparently, the lobster grows 15% in size and 40-50% in weight just in the few hours immediately after molting.  The point is that the lobster's stimulus for growth is being all squashy and uncomfortable in its old shell.  Without this discomfort, it never has to molt ...

In the TV series "Elementary", which is a modern take on Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock is a recovering drug addict, who, at the start of the series, is compelled to attend sober classes akin to the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.  He is constantly resentful about having to go to these classes, insisting that they are not helpful to him, and that he is perfectly capable of dealing with his own challenges. In one particular episode, he is coming up to his one year anniversary of being sober, but he stubbornly refuses to attend the celebratory ceremony to receive a "one year sober" chip token.  An interesting conversation later ensues when a fellow recovering addict points out to Sherlock: "You think this is about you.  It isn't." "What?" "This isn't about you.  When you receive that chip, the other people see that you can stay sober for a year, and it gives them hope that they can do it too.   That's why you go to these me...