I was a commodity trader for a long time and trading taught me a lesson that I'd like to share. One of the beauties of trading is that you can get feedback on how you're doing over very short timeframes. That is, if you buy a few "lows" and sell some "highs" between 10 and 11 in the morning, you're doing great! If you do the opposite, you're not.
          I'm a big Walt Disney fan and I love Disney World (and Disneyland) and our family would go for a week or so, usually in February. In the weeks before vacation I would make or lose some money - nothing spectacular. But in the week I returned I would almost invariably make great decisions, my timing would be good and I'd pay for the vacation expenses and then some within a few days of our return.
          The worker-productivity researchers and gurus and "wise guys" tell you that vacations tend to make workers more productive and profitable. Somehow in the jobs I've had where I had a boss, he or she just never seemed convinced of that. It was always like they were doing me a favor by giving me some time off.
         There's a quote from George Meany, the AFL-CIO president of my youth that goes like this: "One of the bad things about being unemployed is that you never get a vacation." That came from a time when consulting and freelancing were less common but a person who is self-employed is well-advised to carve out vacation time and then take it.
          The caveat is that when vacation is over, you have to get back to work. That's me and I'm now officially back to work.

          With my wife back home and neither of us constrained to tea-totalling, I finally got to have that beer with Wally. We were, of course, the picture of moderation and thus the conversation had some gravitas.
          I know, boring! However . . .
          We got chatting about Edward Snowden – who can avoid it these days? – but Wally got personal. “When I was a fairly young man,” he said, “a woman shared something that I knew I would never be able to tell anyone, probably not even her.”
          “It was heavy.” He paused for a second and added, “dude,” but that only lightened the mood a little. Wally is as straight as an arrow gets and I knew that this secret stood out because he probably didn’t have more than a couple others to keep. “It’s been heavy for forty years.”
          What do secrets do to people (or institutions) that keep them? What was this secret doing to my friend? How does keeping secrets change the nature of governments and other institutions?
          “I was watching Chris Hayes the other night,” I offered, “and when he went into his polemic, the one he does in the middle of the show, he started with, ‘No one questions that a government has to have secrets, . . .’ and I sat in front of the TV, physically raised my hand and offered, ‘I do,’ but he went right on.”
          Wally smiled.
  “There’s a certain lack of truthfulness in keeping secrets,” I added, “but most of the world dismisses you as naïve if you question the inescapability of it.”

I guess Wally had put his secret back in the place where he keeps it and was done talking about it. “It’s deep,” he said as he ordered us another beer, “. . . dude.”