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.
