Just too cool not to share

Ok, this may not be everybody's thing or exactly what I have posted in the past, but too cool not to share.  This guy is a Talent Show Instant Win Card!!! 

The Christmas Story

It appears that I only take time to contemplate and actually write my thoughts down near holidays.  So here is my Christmas post.  Written after some time of reflection and after another fantastic evening at Grandma's with the family  I have spent over 20 years of Christmas' with.  With my love here goes...

What is the central message of Christmas?  Is it the love of Christ?  Is it the act of giving gifts?  Is it the time spent honoring those we love with our presence and our joy?  Or are these just by-products of a more fundamental truth?  I believe the answer lies in the very beginning of the Christmas story. 

The story starts with a birth, the story begins with hope.  What can be more hopeful than the birth of a child?  An empty canvas with all the colors of the world available to be painted upon it…a life unburdened with the sorrows the world and our fellow man can offer.  And what a hope this particular birth brought…the hopes of generations of peoples on the shoulders of an infant.  And what faith does God have in this story; to pass the continuing of His kingdom, the hopes of His people, and the continuing of His very being to the son of a carpenter. 

What faith in the goodness of his creation does God show?  Why does he trust that His son’s message will be carried?  In the hearts of a few men and women was the mission passed to and yet it burned as an unquenchable fire in the bellies that could not be denied.  What led them to risk and ultimately lose life over Christ’s message?  What pushed them to the very ends of their earth?  It was hope. 

Jesus offered a glimmer of hope; for many long looked for and for others a deux ex machina (aid unlooked for).  He was a calm voice in a wilderness of doubt, a healer in the midst of no cure and a beacon of light in a sea of an infinite darkness.  Christ’s birth set in motion a chain of events that shook the very foundations of the world upon which we and our ancestors have existed and continue to exist.  If for nothing else this one fact would both comfort and embolden me.  Our life is intrinsically tied to those who have come before us, those we encounter in our journey, and those that we leave behind; the impact we can have on all of those journeys is one of incredible magnitude; that which should never be taken lightly, but always taken with hopeful hearts.  This day among all others we should remember Jesus Christ, his birth, and the hope it offers to us.  His life is a testament to all that is good in this world.  I ask that on this day we cast aside our doubts, lean not on our fears, and plunge forward into our lives with a child-like belief in hope; understanding that, as every artist knows, our canvas is as filled with as many possibilities for joy as it was the day we were born.  We must believe in the vision of joy, pick up the brush filled with hope, and paint the pictures of our lives in vibrant strokes of yellow. 

To those that I love the most in this world, Merry Christmas!

A Life of Love

I have been doing a lot of staring out of train cars watching what have been some quite beautiful Chicago sunsets. My mind runs beyond its limits on most of these days and so it is time to attempt to summarize some of the disparate thoughts that have been swirling around. Again I love it when you comment or write back as it helps me in my thought process and often gives me new ideas and opinions to consider. I hope this finds you all with overflowing happiness as we close in on my favorite holiday, Thanksgiving. We truly have so much to be thankful for and it is unfortunate we have only way day to celebrate our thankfulness (many other cultures dedicate whole weeks to celebrate their major achievements or ideas I think we should adopt these practices into American Culture, besides more time off). So without further ado here are the thoughts I have been having most recently in a somewhat loosely summarized manner.


My life philosophy has become quite simple. I have really trimmed it down to two main ideas; my own happiness and the happiness of those people around me. Christ understood this concept best, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” You see he understood a part of our fundamental nature that informs every part of our life. He understood that we are incapable of expressing to other people that which we don’t feel about ourselves; namely love. Satisfaction or confidence with ourselves is not enough, it falls short. We must be able to see ourselves as God does; immaculate beings created out of love, designed for love, God’s last and greatest creation. It is in this light that our capacity for love is unleashed and knows no bounds. I am not claiming that you can only love yourself through Christ, but I do believe we have to see ourselves as Christ does; His greatest creation, made in His own image, His precious. If we see ourselves as somebody’s precious, somebody’s greatest creation, made in somebody’s very image than it enables us to realize our worth and value; and thus love, protect, and cherish ourselves in a way that is infectious and quite literally overflows into the lives of those people around us. Thus, bringing us to the real reason why we love ourselves; in order to more effectively accomplish the primary mission of our lives…loving others.

I believe we were created, were given life, in order to become vessels for God’s love (or if you want, just insert love instead of God’s love if that suits you better.) Regardless the value we offer the world is the amount of happiness we can bring other people during and after the time we have on this planet. Our early years should be spent accepting challenges, cultivating empathy, and receiving love from those who watch over us (parents, siblings, relatives, friends, etc.). As we grow in maturity and experience so too does our compassion and empathy. Unfortunately, this is quite the dream scenario and in many instances challenges prove to be too tough, the love from others is not delivered in the abundance we require (if at all), and the love we need to feel for ourselves never manifests and thus empathy is stunted and rarely if ever surfaces. This makes self-awareness difficult, because it is all too easy to push off our problems on others failings or go the route of instant gratification through any number of long term self-destructive/selfish behaviors. However, courses can be reset, new memories formed, and in an instant of self-reflection we can redefine ourselves and our capacity for love.

We all harbor deficiencies, shame, and guilt over the lives we’ve led, the decisions we’ve made, and the times we have fallen short of our own or others expectations; but the difference we must recognize is that each passing moment we are reborn into a new world. Every step down life is at a crossroads and we can continue to reinforce our previous decisions, alter them slightly, or radically change course. We can recreate ourselves in a blink of an eye. The world at large may not be as quick to recognize this change, which is why we need to stay the new course as proof of our new persona. Of course without proper self-reflection this road seems to constantly move at breakneck pace and every direction seems fraught with peril and danger. This of course adds excitement, but also fear and further opportunities for indecision. But what is most important (and most difficult) is that we not allow ourselves to be controlled by the ashes of our past, but instead invigorated by the excitement of our new future.

But alas, our minds love what is comfortable; we seek security exactly twice as passionately as risk, we are twice afraid of losing as we are of gaining, and our brain is designed to take our previous experiences and analyze them to inform our future decisions. Therefore, lastly I would advocate for an out of body self awareness that can only be achieved through what I call peaceful argument (others might say spirited debate). This is a process by which a subject is engaged with his/her own experiences weighed and measured against both the experiences of the collective and another person who feels quite differently from you. Steel that has been forged in the fire by an experienced blacksmith comes out of the fire much stronger than when it went in. (In the process the metal takes quite a beating and often changes its shape, going in as a hunk of rock and coming out a polished and beautiful instrument.) It is only when we listen with both ears, heart, and mind to the opinion of others that we actually hear what they are saying and contemplate those ideas and opinions on a level that gives honor to that person and their life. I have more to say on this, but this is a good enough starting point and hopefully I will follow up in the next couple of days with Part II of this part of my mind.

Seasonal Beauty

Last Friday the seasons changed…I’m not sure why but it took me by surprise. The mornings became dark and a chill sets in around my thighs as I wait for the train. However it is still early and the steam rises up over the lake and creates a canvas upon which the sunlight applies oranges, pinks, greys, blues, and the occasional deep purples with broad, deft strokes. Each morning is a new portrait and the most wonderful part is that with each passing moment the portrait shifts, takes on an entirely different identity. Perhaps Monet understood this concept as he painted the same pond over and over again. Realizing that the same place held an infinite amount of beauty that could only be unlocked through years of observation under a variety of conditions; but eventually, I imagine he succumbed to the reality that he had not enough years, nor paint and canvas to capture the true beauty of the pond. This could be thought of as a moment of absolute despair, a true reckoning of a hopeless mortality. However I would like to believe that Monet, as an artist, was in pure exaltation.


The beauty of a mere pond unable to be accurately portrayed, grasped, or explained despite a lifetime of study… What does this say of God’s more complex creations, what of the morning sunrise, the waterfall in the wilderness, and of course that which all men find most beautiful in this world, woman. That I should be given ten score lifetimes to discover the beauty of woman and still fall short delights me. God, in his infinite wisdom, made beauty the most elusive prey. Happy Hunting I say!

Exploring Loneliness

The idea that God knows everything about me is perhaps the most comforting part of his nature. As the waves rolled into the shore of Lake Michigan today and the sun painted cotton candy pink across the hazy blue sky I reached back into the wellspring of memory. Walking down the beach holdings hands with the summer girl, watching Trapper sprint down the sand in the fading light out the back window of our jeep, the crab bake with the fire so high it burnt the clouds, a late night an empty heart and no one singing, the shock of water warmer than the air, a full moon, a dark sea, and my greatest friends of all time in arms reach, and an ocean so raw it was obvious the water was indeed God’s untamed spirit. These memories are forever locked into time and space and only I have the ability to recall them at will. This is the ultimate loneliness. A lifetime of memories and a quest to be understood, perhaps that is a definition of humanity. But of course our comfort must come from God the creator who is, in a word, amongst. This loneliness is what drives us towards spouses and community. It is the basic emotion that drives us to social groups instead of isolation and never have I understood it as much as I do know, writing alone on a beach with only the gull’s cries and the waves comforting brush against the earth.


It is getting cold as the sun sets. The cool breeze chills my skin, warning me of the frost, ice, and snow that is to follow in the months to come. My hair pulls back in the breeze and I am reminded of a similar night on a spit of sand surrounded by water on the Sea of Cortez. My hands are beginning to shake and the lightless decoy sets come to mind my gloved hands frozen between my Dad's steaming naked hands. The city glistens from the last rays of the fading sun and this new merger of myself, space, and time create another memory that will be recalled in some distant future. Just as the light fades so must we, but for now I will remember myself and trust that my memory is protected by my God and that collective will be treasured as much as I do now.

Walking back with my hands in my pockets I was dreaming of what could be and I passed two boys aged about five playing in their front yard. One came running out of the bushes holding the front of his pants and said “I gotta go inside. I got some on my pants. Guard my scooter buddy” I still have a smile on my face…it was a strangely beautiful moment. It does not surprise me one bit that Christ spent much of his time amongst children! I pray that in our adult lives we still have that “buddy” that will guard our scooter as we take time to clean ourselves up from one of life’s many pitfalls.

“Guard my scooter buddy.”

How we decide

I am currently reading this book called how we decide by jonah lehrer. Fascinating book! He really dives into the biological functioning of our brains and the chemical processes that take place when we are making decisions. It has already made me think much differently about the decisions i make each and every day (especially in trading) and has also revealed to me the big fallacy of emotions being a negative and detrimental part of life that must be supressed at all costs. Anyway i will share much more on this fascinating book as i have more time to write and I am further along but just wanted to say that if you wanted a fascinating read, pick up How We Decide, you won't be dissapointed.

Trend Lines and Time Frames

I have thought a lot recently about the similarities between trading and life but two elements continue to run through my mind; pivot points and multiple time frames. In trading we like to view things from multiple time frames in order to see the different trends that the derivative is making. For example a five minute chart may show the stock is moving in an upwards direction but the 30 minute chart may show that in fact the stock is moving down. Examining my life utilizing the time frame method is an interesting exercise that can help us find the path we are searching for. On any given day our life may swing around crazily as we are extremely governed by many predetermined forces exerting their pressures on us. When examined on a longer time frame, those pressures that on a 5 minute slice of our life threaten to overwhelm us are shown to be easily eliminated. Taking many different snapshots our life allows us to move beyond our daily struggles and map out a much more thoughtful and meaningful existence. This process helps identify the direction our life is taking. What you do with that information is completely up to the individual but every good trader constantly reassesses their performance or direction in order to respond to a rapidly changing world and maximize their performance in it.

Pivot points are those places the market tends to reverse direction and they exist on many different time frames and for a host of reasons. On your way to work you are feeling good; sipping your coffee, reading the newspaper when an email comes from your boss detailing the new and unexpected projects that must be done today. If you start to get upset and your emotions begin to alter your thought process, you have hit a pivot point. This sudden reversal of your daily life is a downward pivot on a short term. This happens despite and regardless of what your longer term trend lines may look like. However the long term perspective has pivot points as well and they may very well start with some simple seemingly random event that over time gains momentum and changes the long term trend line. In retrospect it is easy to identify these points; when we chose our college and when we meant our husband/wife being just a couple examples. But if you are cognizant enough of your life's trend lines and their subsequent effect on your very own shaping and molding then you could identify even the tiny pivot points in the minutiae of life and take steps to focus on consistently driving your life toward your goals. You never know what might be a turning point in your life and therefore should stay constantly alert or else what started as a simple disagreement or bad decision may multiply, eventually counteracting the long term trend line and establish itself as the dominant trend and without constant maintenance this new direction your life has taken may be one you never intended. Of course if you find yourself there just focus on the pivot points that will bring you back to the direction you want. I could write for days on these two topics of pivot points and time frames in life but I will let anybody that reads this dwell on it and perhaps some thoughts…

PS Sorry about the email blasts that probably went out, I am experimenting with texting to my blog posts and clearly it did not work…

Anticipation

Words and excitement have flowed from me like light from the sun. From one perspective these rays may look focused and concentrated but in reality they are as scattered as snowflakes. Each idea flutters down from the sky and finds it's rating place.  The moment is vast approaching and the closer it gets the more surreal the moment feels.  

My ah ha moment is almost upon me.

This morning I took time to take stock of the last year of my life.  

Here are some highlights. Graduated from college. Moved halfway across the country. Left every friend I had. Proposed. Got engaged (these two happened within seconds) Got a new job. My first job... Moved to a new city. Learned to live with a roomate, well kind of the jury is still out on whether I have shown any development on that front. Exhibit A being the piles of clothes that are currently in random places all over the apartment.

Now when you list it out like that it appears to be quite a year.   

However in the past couple of months I have never really thought it that much more life filled than amy other. I dwell on this and discover that much of this is due to my underlying confidence. Most people who spend time with me quickly realize that my substantially healthy confidence is one of my most commanding traits. For better or worse my confidence usually thrusts me down paths in life with a certain ferocity and strength of purpose that I understand can be difficult to match or understand.

This strength of purpose is what has taken control this year. In the absence of certainty about the future I have allowed this side of me to take the lead. This is why I have never doubted my wedding tomorrow why I for the most part have not thought top much about it. Because my strength of purpose and my belief in my destiny and fate concludes that nothing other than tomorrow will occur. Time will do as it always has and march ever onward. It is our duty to pay not as much attention to the ticking of the hands but  to the turning of the gears in our own lives.

This will most likely be my last post before the wedding. For those of you coming thank you and I will be happy to see you there. If you read this after the fact I hope you had a spectacular time. For tomorrow I marry Kierin and our destinies and our fates will from that day forward march forward into the fog of time together; hands clasped with smiles on our faces for we are assured of the others' presence on this perilous journey that We have walked for thousands of years. I pray that if Kierin and I come upon you in our path that it be a blessing and a gift to you. Thank you and with much love, Trevor

Something about focus, can't remember doing somethign else now...

The currents of life

Christ has been and forever will be my greatest teacher but today I am thinking about some lessons from the Buddhist tradition. I think no religion does a better job of acknowledging the large impact emotions have on our life. The buddhists teach a doctrine rooted in mindfulness. A practice that instructs it's followers to continually take stock of your emotions and the impact they are having on your cognitive abiliites.  The results of this practice are readily apparent by taking just a cursory glance at some of the words ascribed  

to Buddhism: peaceful, tranquil, centered, focused, and disciplined.   

How many of us strive for those same things every day and yet fall short?

In my life I spend my when day monitoring my emotions and gauging how they are impacting my decision making practice because the emotion I started a trade with may not be the same as the one I am using to exit that trade. Therefore, I am quite literally two different minds and continuing to trade as two different people would not be consistent and would have a negative impact on my performance.  Taking your emotional temperature throughout the day will help you achieve that centered lifestyle that you may be craving. It will not solve your problems but it may just center your thoughts enough that there is only one of you responding to the world's stimuli.

Physics Terms

Conduits or catalysts

A disclaimer to this post, i have not taken physics since high school and would not consider myself even somewhat familiar with the terms i am using in this post so i apologize if there metaphorical composition is flawed. 

Every day I sit in front of 5 screens and all day scroll through and analyze perhaps millions of pieces of data. My fine times brain picks out the two words on a website I am looking at, I find one number on a chart of hundreds that dictates my next decision, and occasionally stop at something that leaves me speechless. There was three things today one a jetpack that runs over water (god please let me live long enough to own one),two a twenty point down move in my spread that took out my gains for the day (I don't involve god in trading) and lastly a picture of a twelve year old boy holding his son. Yeah that's right son. By the way all of these things are real.

But as I ride the train towards a car ride to Minnesota I wonder am I a conduit or a catalyst. You see a conduit is simply something one passes through to get to where they are going, but a catalyst, that is something that quite literally adds something to the one moving through it's orbit. A catalyst puts itself into the mix and all of a sudden something powerful happens. The catalyst propels the person forward to untold new heights and at a pace that is both shocking and refreshing.

You know it right away when you are in the presence of a catalyst their vibrancy for life flows from them like a super soaker in august.  

Excuse the childhood reminesce there but those who have had the super soaker in august experience are blessed and know what I mean.

Hallejuah

This morning a woman got onto the train car. This is generally unspectacular but then she did something that on the 6:00 am train is rather unusual she greeted everybody on the train. "good morning my brothers and sisters hallelujah". She then proceeded to inform is that god had driven her out of bed that morning to preach the word...so she did. Between Howard and Bellmont on the upper north side in a train car full of commuters. 

It was beautiful. 

Now most of my fellow riders probably did not agree and a few were actually perturbed.  But she went on regardless driven by god's spirit she claimed. Now I do understand that she might have had some form of mental disturbance (but perhaps not because of get well dressed appearance and clarity of thought), but I couldn't help but wonder, is this the way that Peter talked about the gospel?  Peter who was so filled with the word that it burst out of him and not just on some train full of sleepy commuters but in a crowd of people who just days earlier had sentenced his Lord and teacher to death. Perhaps this came from his experience of the resurrected Christ? Perhaps he no longer feared death or physical harm as he had just days earlier because of his personal encounter with his lord?  Perhaps it was the holy spirit that upon entering Peter's body granted him the courage to speak out? All we can be sure of is that Peter was a dramatically transformed person in the course of a week.  He went from cowardly silent Peter to courageous outspoken Peter. But getting back to my story...I now desperately want to seek that woman out and ask her what happened in her life that led to her being so convicted by God that she preached his word to a generally apathetic audience on a upper north side train car?  Which brings me to my final thought I have had today.  

Apathy, the whole train car was rank with it.  It seems so strange that we would all collectively seemingly punish this "crazy" woman with our silence and our inability to look her in the eyes, afraid to attract the attention of somebody that passionate about a single subject.  Somehow the appreciation for passion was lost on us that morning.  My final question is where and when does that appreciation from passion disappear? At what moment or topic are we no longer able to acknowledge the passion of another as something to be cherished and recognized?  An important distinction must be made, it is not that I am saying we must participate or even agree with that individual but we should at least acknowledge their passion.  A child is pushed into their passions at every stage of life.  How often does little Johnny get driven to basketball practice, lug his instrument back and forth from school, or fill endless pages of paper with drawings or writing.  Never does anybody fail to acknowledge a child's drive for a particular arena of life, but yet when it becomes mature, when it becomes developed these people are pushed to the edges of our society and deemed irregular and not to be engaged with.  How many of the people on that train if they took an introspective moment would realize that that woman was more passionate about her spirituality than they were on their entire life.  How many of any of us can say that we are so passionate about anything that we would stand up in a train car and announce it to a group of sleepy strangers.  Not many of us at all would have that kind of flame in our life.

So in a way this post is two things, my own silent pitiful excuse of an acknowledgement of that woman's passion for her God and an encouragement for us to live outside of the box in our life's ambitions.  A reminder that great passion is seldom found in normal acts or situations and that if you want to elevate your life to the level of passion of those of the greatest of our heroes (Abe Lincoln, Ben Franklin, Henry David Thoreau, Michael Jordan, MLK jr., Tiger Woods, or any of the numerous figures that pursued their life with passion beyond ordinary measure) you must be willing to step outside of the box.  It is extraordinarily easy to dream, but the true measure of life is making good on those dreams and if we dream big we will need nothing short of extraordinary passion to realize our life's true potential.  May you find your passionate and be courageous enough to leave what is normal in order to pursue it.