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. 

Foolishly Beautiful

Billy Collins recently came to do a poetry reading at our college campus. I loved his poems because they are so wonderfully simple. They delight the reader's imagination and yet at the same time our journey never leaves the living room or kitchen. His last poem that he read that night concludes, "We are all so foolish, my long bebop solo begins by saying, so damn foolish ,we have become beautiful without even knowing it." I am now listening to Please Forgive me by David Gray. The lyrics go, "Please forgive me if I act a little strange, for I know not what I do, feels like lightning running through my veins everytime I look at you. " I am always amazed when artists speak directly to my soul through their requisite medium. I am always surprised that they could be so effective at touching my heart so succintly even though we have never met. Whether it is an arresting line of poetry, beautiful love ballad, a painting rich in color, or a sculpture that is ready to walk off its podium and delight the world with its beauty and wisdom they all are amazing and worthy of praise and honor.

This idea of foolish beauty grabs my senses in a particularly profound manner because it is what my heart has been feeling now for many weeks. We are all so foolish (if you don't believe it come and view the college atmosphere on any given weekend) and yet we are all so beautiful. Even our very existence, a tremendous gift, is beauty. What if we all saw the world the way some artists do, the beauty in every line, in every movement, in every breath taken.

My favorite sermon I have ever heard was from JR Briggs regarding Vincent Van Gogh. JR explained that Van Gogh's life was filled with much sorrow and depression and yet in the times of his life that were light and joyful his paintings overflow with the color yellow. Even Starry Night, in all of its inky darkness the yellow shines through to capture the moment and illuminate the dark night in all of its splendor. I am not sure what caused Van Gogh to reach for his yellow paint brush at certain times and to cast it aside at others, but what I do understand is that we all must have something in our lives that causes the yellow to spring forth from ourselves.

Opportunities

So for the last three weeks I have been sending emails to companies and employees asking them if they have any current opportunities available. I have spelled "opportunities" wrong just about every time. Luckily I have spell checker enabled on my emails... whew. Anyway that is definetly not what I logged on to say. I have to say that I feel that I have so many opportunities in front of me. Most of this has been due to my own hard work and dedication in creating these opportunities, but I can't stop thinking, man I wish that I had less options. Now I know this is a competely ridiculous thought. I realize that I love the fact that I have such a blessed life...that I would never turn my back and spurn God's wonderful gift to me. However at this present moment I have to answer the question, "what do you want to do?" so much that I feel like I should start putting a sign on my head with all the different options written in bold with subcategories below. It might look something like this,

Consulting
Management
Human Resources
Strategy

Retail
Sporting Goods
Outdoor Goods

Financial
Financial Planner
Investment Broker
Venture Capitalist (i know its hard and like impossible, but hey somebody does it)

Entrepreneur
"so whats your idea?" (this is where I proceed to tell them that I picture myself more in the management finance type role and I am looking for a partner that does not understand the phrase, outside the box, typically they laugh and say good luck)

So I think I will just print this out and email it to everyone I know and carry around a copy copies with me so that in the appropriate situation I can whip out the handy duct tape and attach it firmly to my forehead...

But on a serious note, those paths above are all the ones that I can see myself pursuing and being happy doing them. Of course that doesnt mean that I have job offers from any of those paths...(actually job offers are at a big fat zero right now). But those are all fields that I could see myself succeeding and being happy pursuing. However, the right path is not always as easy as it seems...It seems obvious to me sometimes that I should pursue this path: Consulting (two years) MBA, Management, Oversee Small Entrepreneur firm, Merger or IPO at 35-->retire (yea). Hold on I just woke back up for a strange dream where I sailed a yacht around the world from age 35 to 90, ahh I see I also just wrote it up... option 2 puruse financial planner at firm, work way up to bigger and bigger accounts, then complete rest of path outlined above. Option three, work at retail store, move up through corporate ladder...

I am rambling... I am honestly not usually as scatter brained as I think this blog makes me out to be. I think that I use this as a vent for extra thoughts that don't have the opportunity to get out any other way. But what I think I am trying to say is that I am excited and nervous about this next decision that I am going to be making soon about when and where I will be working. It is the waiting that kills me, I am somebody that needs to actively pursue a task in order to be satisfied knowing that it will be complete, but this job search is such a passive process. Send out resumes, do follow up emails, call people, arrange meetings, then when all that is done...sit back and wait...and wait. But thats OK I just need to focus on enjoying what little time I have left in school to enjoy it and cherish the time I have left with friends that have become my family for the last four years. Soon that family will be stretched across the world and I will truly miss them all.

It really only hit me the other day that my CC family will be scattered across the globe come this spring. I was left feeling very empty, we have all been there for each other for the last four years and in the course of a few months we will all scatter and will probably never come together as a group ever again. I hope that we can reconnect in some way, in some place, some time...but my cynical nature doubts that slightly. But anyway dinner is calling me and I have been typing for far too long about nothing especially important or vexing. Good night for now.

Stress

Really stressed right now. That is about all I can say. I just feel like this whole job thing comes crashing down on me once every week. I just have these awful moments where I see my whole life coming down to whether or not I can find a stupid job this next year and then I realize that I still don't have one and that is so upsetting right now. My friends are moving into deeper stages of interviews, getting offers, etc. and it has taken me three stinking weeks just to get three resumes submitted. Plus the entire time I realize that I missed the boat leaving from the pier and that I am currently attempting to jump on the ship as it slips away from the dock. AHHHHH I just really wish that something would present itself and I could just say "Yes." So far every oppurtunity has been so much more complicated than it originally seemed. Plus about the only good offer I have gotten is from a company that really does not line up with my skillset at all.

I know that I have so much more time to figure this all out and that the job is going to come, but sometimes it just overwhelms me and I write things like this...

The thing is I am not daunted by the interviews or the resume application or any of that. I know what I have to offer, I know what the firms are looking for, and I am really not that afraid of rejection. The painful stressful part is this in between stage, where you are whittling the field and constantly trying to give yourself the best possible chance of getting an interview at these companies. That stage is long, annoying, stressful, and just difficult. Anyway I am laboring far too long on all of this, I just need to take a few deep breaths and remind myself of everything I have going for me at this point in my life and that a job will most certainly come in some capacity or another.

I should be rejoicing in the last few months of college but instead I have spent the last few weeks spending almost all of my time emailing back and forth with contacts, job opps, and thesis ideas. I just pray now that I can find a job sooner rather than later. I know that it will come, I, as always, just want it to come Now. All right time to end this little rant so I can go take some deep breaths and enjoy life for a few minutes before sleep.