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.