Change, never welcome, always necessary.
When it comes, frightening, unsettling. Breaking chains of unnoticed habit forged over a long life of doubt.
Time, it seems, to bid farewell to the dry pastures of financial markets. Can life flourish in fields where self promotion and deception rule. Where success seems inextricably bound to falsehood and brash salesmanship.
Two decades of writing algorithms and trading them. Twenty long years of battling chaos in a universe where prediction is impossible and where flow is the only rule worth following.
What now I wonder.
Why would a seeker have wandered the canyons of Wall Street and the crooked allies of a then almost Dickensian London. In those far off days, Marley and Scrooge still had their brass knocker bolted to some ancient oaken door, in a tarnished corner close to the river.
Apparent security must have been the answer. To say nothing of foolish naivete – stability was nowhere to be found, least of all in the carnivorous banking halls at the heart of the city of mammon.
Were they all bad? The scurrying minions and rainmaking bosses. By no means but they offered scant companionship to someone who preferred the marbled pillars of St Paul’s to the polished floors of the counting houses.
A kind lady from Kangaroo Island was good enough to read my words today. “Call It As it Is” she says. Once the Island of the Dead, where better to contemplate life, death and all stations in between.
As far removed from the brash and the modern as you would need to go, how often have I thought of a life of solitude in just such a place.
But peace is an effort of will not some physical realm. As easy or as difficult to achieve in a heaving metropolis as a desert island, if only you know the trick.
And now? To write more, perhaps. Or better. There is a thought, but to what end. To no end, of course. There are no ends, just as there are no beginnings.
There is flow, just flow. And the need to go with it.
There perhaps is the lesson I never learned in those early days. The folly of battling one’s own nature instead of working with it. The futility of forcing a quiet and contemplative mind to enter the fray alongside the swagger and the talk of those better built for combat.
What now I wonder.
A one man closed order, I remain in a walled garden. No teaching, nothing to impart. No grand gospel, no treatise on all that is.
To talk of peace may be to spread it. One soul flowing quietly with the stream may encourage a few others.
Weltanschauung 
Yes, just be…
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“The folly of battling one’s own nature instead of working with it. The futility of forcing a quiet and contemplative mind to enter the fray alongside the swagger and the talk of those better built for combat.”
Oh my word! This was my life situation exactly. How I wish I’d been able to see it and act on it then. It was there all the time though, always hovering on the very edge of my distracted discernment. You capture and express the experience so well, Anthony. I’d wish every Seeker to see and recognise this singular human experience and know themselves under the human guise.thereby. I didn’t. I chased the money, didn’t see my real way.
On the other hand perhaps our miserable experiences got us here on purpose anyway?
Well done Anthony, and thank you.
Kindest regards,
Keith.
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I wonder? Yes perhaps you are right. Behind most miseries seems to lie the fear for survival. If you are willing to just “not survive” and can laugh in the face of adversity, then life must take on an altogether easier mien. You have made me think of Kipling’s “If”!
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Great poem. I suspect more of it stuck with me over the years than I give credit for to this monumental soliloquy of human culture …
(A very wealthy, tough dealer acquaintance married to a former girlfriend of mine had what police noted as “no visible means of livelihood support” and confided he cried whenever he played a BBC tape of this over and over).
Regards, Keith.
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“Change, never welcome, always necessary.” When I was younger change was welcome. In my old age not so much.
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Change from a place of safety can be very pleasant. Visiting strange lands not as a bedraggled war torn refugee, but as a well heeled tourist. Discovering different authors, composers, artists. New thoughts, new attitudes to life are always welcome. But of course change is not always “good” change. Again, as I was saying to Keith, the only way through is to try to smile on adversity and accept it. Easy enough to say!
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Rueful laughter in agreement, Ron!
Keith.
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if it is all an illusion it matters not, less about what we do but why….as Krishnamurti says ‘have sex dont have sex, just get on with it…as always really enjoy your work Anthony
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You are very kind Annie. I am glad I have discovered Kanagaroo Island too! But yes, all an illusion. Whimsical as I usually am in my writings, an amateur interest in science also informs my views from time to time. And if, as our scientific brethren say, we and everything we see around us are “mere” force fields, energy, then we do indeed appear to be an illusion. A pretty convincing one at that. Especially for those without the luck to be sitting in a peaceful cottage and writing. Anyway, on a brighter note, I am delighted to see the world appears to be rid of a bigoted racist with his finger on a nuclear button on the other side at the Atlantic. I take little interest in politics, but the world will seem a better place without Donald! Oh for a better world.
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I think we must be in just about the same place in our lives right now. I’m so tired of all this (often silly) work that I have done for others. I’m ready to take FULL ownership of my life–life, which is really just the time we’ve been alloted. I’m ready to disappear. Maybe I will reemerge elsewhere and be the freest version of Troy I’ve been since I was a wee thing without a single care. We think we are enslaved–and we are–but the slavemaster is often the slave. We just need to break free of ourselves, our old ways of living. All we have to do is say, “It’s over” and it can become.
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I think we must! To me so much seems silly and contact with other people so often leads to conflict of one sort or another with people. To have not a single care would be wonderful. I think our enslavement is the need for physical survival and this inevitably involves conflict. And competition. Competing for jobs, to sell products, to stop others taking ones goods or livelihood. My favorite science fiction envisages a post scarcity world. If only!
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Just be. You are enough. We are grateful for your words and your thoughts.
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That is very kind of you and much appreciated. Just be! Yes, that is the way to lead life to the full.
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