To be right or to be happy

I know, I’ve been M.I.A these last few weeks. I went back to Melbourne to escape the scorching April heat in Bangkok, and spent most of the time buried in newspapers, books and financial reports. Investing can consume you like that. There’s so much to know, and so much you need to know to do well. Every bit of information that you learn gives you an edge in being able to make the right decisions. Plus it’s interesting, every intellectual tangent has value and can be followed to your hearts content.

I’m running fast to catch up too. Through good fortune, I’ve been thrust into managing a whole portfolio (albeit a small one) and where most people would have had a ten year apprenticeship working in an investment bank or wealth management company to get to this point, all I’ve had is a 4 year auto-didactic crash course. The life experience before that still counts though, and a good part of investing well comes down to temperament. Temperament is usually developed by being whacked over the head by life enough times, IF you’re open to learning from it. Well that’s one part of it, the other part seems to be innate. That innate part includes being a contrarian, a level of irreverence for authoritative voices, and the presence of mind to stay firm when others are overly exuberant or scared shitless.

My home state of Victoria is called the “garden state”. The greenery is something I took for granted growing up, but after having lived in big Asian cities I realise how special it is. The streets are tree lined, most people live in houses with lawns, trees and flowers decorating both the front and back gardens, and to top it off we have some of the most beautiful public parks anywhere in the world. Having said that, I also like the energy that comes with big, dense cities like Bangkok, or Osaka where I used to live (and where I’ll be visiting next week).

Aside from finance/investing my other area of focus is increasingly spirituality. A term which I hesitate to use because I know it instantly throws people down a certain frame of thinking, a bit like saying religion, or God. But spirituality or what it points towards, is as much of a science as it is an art, and to complicate things further it is of course beyond both.

The thing about spirituality is, it sounds like utter tripe to the mind, that is at least until you have a spiritual experience yourself. Then, all of a sudden, it no longer sounds ridiculous but makes perfect sense. A spiritual experience doesn’t mean you start glowing and hover off the ground, although it can feel like that. Usually it’s more subtle. I suppose it does take a certain level of openness to recognise it when it happens. But the main thing about it is, it’s not something that you create. There’s no exact formula. You can’t meditate for x number of hours, eat a specific diet and hit nirvana like cracking a safe. It is, I think, a matter of grace. And that is a very humbling thing. It means that the pinnacle of human experience is beyond our control.

What we can control however is our openness to experience. Specifically by accepting whatever our current circumstances are, that includes accepting how we feel at the time. I’m reading an interesting book that talks about this called Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender by David R. Hawkins . The author describes a simple but very powerful technique in this book, which I had inadvertently discovered in my childhood.

Once in a while like all kids, I used to get scrapes, cuts, stings and jarred fingers and what I realised is that the most effective way to get past the pain is not actually to soothe it, but instead to focus on it. Let’s say for example you burnt the back of your hand and its throbbing with pain, I found that focusing on it intensely, putting all your attention on that pain, would at first make it even more painful but if you stick with it, that pain will actually start to subside.

Now this is hard to do, but like going to the gym or taking an ice bath, that short term discomfort gives you enormous benefit. The same process works for unpleasant feelings. Most of us are in the soothing game, we’ll do almost anything to avoid feeling that emotional pain. We are always running. Instead you can try the same technique, whenever an unpleasant feeling comes up instead of looking at social media, snacking on food or doing something else, sit somewhere quite and focus intently on the feeling. How is it manifesting in your body, perhaps a tightness in your chest, a pain in your stomach or a tight raspy throat. As you keep focused on that feeling thoughts will start to spring off, they don’t mean anything, just let them go. Keep your focus on the feeling. And just let it sit and work on accepting it fully. Resist the temptation to label it as good or bad. And as you accept it fully, it will gradually begin to lose it’s grip on you and eventually pass like a cloud. In this way you can deal with things as they come up and also begin to clear out the backlog of junk from your past that is clogging up your system.

The book I mentioned goes into a great deal more detail.

Like with many things that can help us, the tempting reaction might be scepticism, which is just another very effective tool that the ego uses to keep you locked in place where you are. The image of a sceptical scientist comes to mind. One who is highly sceptical of everything that hasn’t been proven by science, but just look at their face, they are miserable. The scientist is of course right on one level, but the question is: do you want to be right or to be happy?