Musings Report #14  4-3-15  Everybody Needs a Crumble Day

    
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Everybody Needs a Crumble Day

One of the more mysterious phrases around our household is "everybody needs a crumble day." The saying draws upon this Rumi poem:

Very little grows on jagged rock. Be ground. 
Be crumbled, so wildflowers will come up where you are.
You have been stony for too many years.
Try something different. Surrender.

Though I am not an expert on Rumi, I think it is fair to say his primary themes are love and vulnerability. His many poems on love are perhaps his most well-known work: "Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along."

But other Rumi poems speak to overcoming our defenses against vulnerability, for much is lost to the grim hardness of everyday life. Though it easy to find Rumi poems that describe the vulnerabilities of love--in modern terms, our fear of intimacy and rejection--I think Rumi is speaking about the larger vulnerabilities of being human.

For example:

You're crying. You say you burned yourself.
But can you think of anyone who's not hazy with smoke? (The Essential Rumi)

Or:

An empty mirror and your worst destructive habits,
when they are held up to each other,
that's when the real making begins.
That's what art and crafting are.

A "crumble day" is time we let ourselves be vulnerable, open to questions and ruminations that have nothing to do with the day-to-day pressures of work and responsibilities.

We have all sorts of defenses: rationalizations, excuses, and avoiding dwelling on our mistakes and misjudgments, the needless ways we've hurt others and the hurt we have caused that was unavoidable.

Yet as Rumi wrote: "Where there is ruin, there is hope for treasures." If we don't examine our life in a crumble day, what have we examined?  Nothing but stony defenses.

A crumble day means surrendering ceaseless purpose and productivity, our desire to be right and decisive; a crumble day allows ambiguities and open questions, questions about the direction of our life that don't have ready answers because they aren't those kinds of questions.

Much of our lives have been shaped by chance and events over which we had no control: the place and time we were born to, unexpected meetings, losses and windfalls, and so on.

But much is still within our own control, and it is this circle we still influence that draws my attention on crumble days.  Each of our lives is a narrative with multiple threads, and the stories we tell ourselves to organize and make sense of the narratives matter. For it is the way we organize all the events and decisions of our life that leads to the big question: what next?

If we don't ask that question, then what we have today is all we'll ever have, because it takes effort and planning to change the narrative of our life in a major way.

At 61, it seems my adult life naturally subdivides into roughly 20-year periods that subdivide into chunks of overlapping time spent in a relationship, locale and career. For example, the blog is soon to be 10 years old.

Is this all I want in life? At 61, I don't have the leisure of youth to gamble a decade on some crazy venture.  Each period of life comes with varying appetites for risk and adventure, and in my crumble moments I think despite the ruin of past decisions and losses, I am not yet ready to surrender to the fear of risk and change.

In my crumble time, when all the errors, hopes, lessons, memories and mourning for those who are gone swirl inside me, I come back to Rumi's mysteriously profound line: "What you seek is seeking you."

Summary of the Blog This Past Week

The Inevitable Failure of Mechanistic Monetary Policy  4/3/15

The U.S. Economy Slows to Stall Speed  4/2/15

A Shocking Admission: "The Federal Reserve is a Criminal Conspiracy"  4/1/15

The Fed Has Failed the Nation, in One Chart  3/31/15

How Many Slots Are Open in the Upper Middle Class? Not As Many As You Might Think  3/30/15


Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week

Viewed the 6-episode Adam Curtis documentary Pandora's Box (Youtube link) on the limits of mechanistic models.  Well worth watching. (Use an HDMI cable or Chromecast plug-in to watch it on your TV.)


Market Musings:  Systemic Risk and Wild Bull/Bear Swings

A recent article on Zero Hedge described the systemic risks now dominant in financial markets:
"Banks, insurance companies and all kinds of funds were taking on huge risks to get through the zero- and negative-yield environment.
“Risk is no longer priced in,” he said. And these investors aren’t paid for the risks they’re taking. This applies to all asset classes, he said. The stock and the bond markets, he said, are now both seeing “the mother of all bubbles.”
He warned that it’s hard for banks to make money by lending due to the combination of low interest rates and the effects of competition.
A whole new generation was growing up without the idea of earning interest on savings in the this zero-interest-rate or negative-interest-rate environment. Without that incentive of interest, they aren’t learning to save."

One of the quant systems I follow has very reliably caught the dominant trend of the stock market for several years.  In the past six trading days, the system has flipped from bullish to bearish (or vice versa) every single day.  There is no trend other than volatility is being crushed to keep stocks elevated.

In this chart of the SPX, we see a wedge that formed in January-February broke to the upside, carving out a new high--but not a very impressive one.  Could the current wedge break to the downside for a change?  Put another way--what could be the catalyst for a new upside breakout?  Better  than expected earnings?  



Conversely--what could trigger a sharp drop? How about weak earnings, extremes of bullishness and lows in volatility?


From Left Field

Toshio Shibata’s Mesmerizing Photographs of Water -- helps there is lots of water in Japan...

I live better on Welfare then I ever did working! -- numbers look realistic to me...

Spanish Congress Approves Draconian Laws Sending Spain Back to the Dark Ages

Why Henry George had a point: land-value tax -- this only works if you get rid of some other tax--which one?

Castles That Are Cheaper Than An Apartment In San Francisco -- the upkeep on the castles is big-bucks...

Over population, over consumption - in photos

A bank run by beggars, for beggars in Bihar town

The Intangible Corporation -- strip away fixed costs: the golden rule of the 21st century

Lee Kuan Yew and the Myth of Asian Capitalism --  lots of things are easier with a tiny population...

None of the world’s top industries would be profitable if they paid for the natural capital they use -- no surprise here...

The Strange Beauty of Soviet-Era Nuclear Relics -- abandoned sites...

U.S. Releases New Seapower Strategy (via Joel M.) -- the "To the Sea" strategy paper in the 1980s was significant. Remains to be seen if this one is equally consequential.

"Our memory is childish and it saves only what we need." Czeslaw Milosz

Thanks for reading--
 
charles