It's all in the details

Sunday 8.52pm

I've never quite got jazz. Some of it I enjoy but then, especially with the more modern stuff it goes somewhere and leaves me behind. The musicians obviously hear something I cannot. And so it is with experts in any field. At some point they become so deeply involved in their subject that they move beyond what us mere mortals can see or understand. I see glimpses of this in my own specialities. I can diagnose the cause of your toothache just by talking to you, sometimes even by just looking at you. The difference between me as the dentist, and you as the patient is that I see the whole picture. I see the cause, what led up to it, the immediate and long term treatment options along with the risks and benefits of each, and more importantly what needs to be done to prevent it happening again. And yet still people complain about my consultation fee because in their words I "did not do anything". They just don't see what I see.

Not everybody will get to that level in their chosen field of course, that stage where you do not have to think things through - you just feel the answer, you just know. Nicola has it in computing, she sees things that I just don't, and like jazz probably never will. 

We all see things differently, something

that is easy to forget. For example I took

the picture above, I wrote the words,

chose the typeface and put the two

things together. But what really makes it work for me is the way I have got the flower petals to sit around the "s" in soup, linking the two paragraphs and tying the words and picture together. Just this one detail makes all the difference.

Life is never dull when you can look at it through anothers eyes.

(That typeface is a condensed Gill Sans, by the way - if you click on the top picture you'll see it better).