Time is relentless. It is also a blessing and it demands contemplation. Contemplation is a natural manure for personal growth. If that means this is all BS, so be it.
Contemplation has recently led me to consider how time has eroded / improved / horribly disfigured /etc. my own temperament / happiness / outlook / etc.
Make sense? Probably not yet.
Jacob turned 3 last week. Birthdays always provide a good reason to reflect, especially about how the things we never imagined would happen to us actually do so, and do so relentlessly. Specifically, I will never get over being a dad. It'll apparently never stop being weird or "hard to believe" how big Jacob gets. Alice blogged about this and she hit the nail right on the head.
My contemplation has lately been a little more self-reflective vis-a-vis Jacob's influence.
Specifically, time / circumstances / whatever have worked to dull the edges I once enjoyed / hated / benefited from. And that's not a bad thing.
What exactly does this mean? It means that the need I once felt so deeply to excel to the highest levels has dissipated. I no longer strive for endless ascension in school / business / life / recreation. I no longer care to compete in a ruthless / attacking sense. I still try to do the very best I can in my profession and still take pride in my work, but I now have one overriding goal: Peace.
I care about spending evenings at home. I care about not being pulled in every direction. I care about doing whatever I want to with my free time.
The only change I can really point to is Jacob's birth. My duties are to him and Jen now, and it makes me feel good to be home a lot. I think this transformation was aided by waiting to have him. I managed to squeeze in a lot of living before his birth / contemplation / existence.
I made a semi-bucket list in my mind and managed to cross off enough of the "me" things that I have never felt deprived by parenthood. I finished Ride The Rockies in 2002, went to law school, spent five weeks in Germany, stood on the Normandy beaches on a June 6, visited Yellowstone, hiked in Volcano National Park in Hawaii, visited Pearl Harbor, gone to a ton of sporting events and even lived in NYC for a summer.
Honestly, I can just take a breath now.
I know I would have put Jacob first had he arrived much earlier, but I think I'd still have some of the tension that accompanied me for the first 28 years of life. I remember my father as very tightly wound when I was younger. He mellowed considerably as he got older, but I've gotten an earlier jump on him in the mellowing department.
Any new bucket list will involve Jacob. I want to take him to Disney World, Sea World, to ball games... play catch, attend school performances and hold his nose to the grindstone in school (OK, so maybe I'm still a little tightly wound).
If there is one point to be made, I guess it's that I never realized how much I would love being a father and timing has something to do with it. Someone once told me you never know when you are ready to be a parent, so you need to stop waiting for the "right" time. At the time, that comment ticked me off because that message was of the "hurry up and have a kid" variety.
I think it's a true statement on its face, but, for me, the timing could not have been more perfect. Timing differs for every set of parents, but I feel like I will be a better father for having waited.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Monday, March 23, 2009
Jacob turns 3!
Some recent pictures of our little guy as he moved from 2 to 3.
Train Set expansion.
Jacob and his Birthday presents.
BATMAN!
Playing Sims with Mommy.
Train Set expansion.
Jacob and his Birthday presents.
BATMAN!
Playing Sims with Mommy.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Pattern Behavior
I imagine financial advice had not changed one bit from the end of WWII until September, 2008. The market goes up and it always will.
I know I heard the advice. I'm certainly not claiming to have known better, but I've always at least suspected that a certain naive comfort had set into the population as a whole. I actually remember one person rolling his eyes when I asked "doesn't the market fluctuate?" No one would ever say "no," but the smile said it all: "there's no guarantee, BUT..."
Jen and I have been told many times by various financial advisers, well-wishers and strangers alike that money would best serve us when put into the market rather than into our home. I even almost cracked a few times. In my head, I began to suspect that maybe we were missing the train by shoving extra funds into prepayments on our home. I even remember one advisor giving me a condescending smile while showing the math based on a 10% return as opposed to money "under-utilized." No one ever questioned the regular growth. At least not really.
To Jen's credit, she wouldn't let me waiver.
My point? I guess it's that pattern behavior eventually leads to trouble because its based on assumptions. Twelve percent growth per year became such a pattern for many investors that no one ever thought, "how could this continue when people are piling up the kind of debt that would give a healthy man a heart attack?" To be fair, no one has asked that until now.
I've often asked anyone in ear shot "how did everyone miss that we were heading for financial ruin? Aren't these CEOs, financial gurus, regulators and overcompensated boards of directors supposed to know what they are doing?"
I've never been one to trust the undefinable "them" anyway, but surely SOMEONE must have seen the signs. Apparently Warren Buffett gave warnings, and I'm sure others did too, but what's a warning when graphs show a generation of growth? After all, the charts I've seen indicate growth that has been almost unfettered for 80 years or more.
I remember learning through quantitative reasoning that an assertion that, "the sun will rise tomorrow because it rose yesterday" was, by definition, a fallacy. No one doubts that tomorrow will bring light, but we can't quantitatively prove it will happen. We take it on pattern and faith. One could also say physics, but we can't know if a meteor will stop tomorrow, so even that is not a certainty. 99% does not equal 100%.
So, while we try to pick up the pieces and unwind the mess we've made, I am left to wonder where we go from here? Maybe, just maybe, we hit the very limit of growth through overuse and over-extension of credit. Maybe we've grown this far ONLY because we were so willing as a people to incur so much debt.
I don't know the answer, but easy credit provides an illusion that we have more than we ever really do. And, eventually, the bill comes due and there is no where else left to turn. It ruins marriages, it strains health and it leads to the kind of bust we are now witnessing.
The only way I think we can ever prevent this kind of crisis from happening again is if recovery leads to responsible use of credit and we stop basing our lives on the fallacy that "past performance guarantees future results." How about this time we don't forget that the market fluctuates.
But, before I get ahead of myself, we need to get through this mess first. Lest I assume recovery before it happens.
I know I heard the advice. I'm certainly not claiming to have known better, but I've always at least suspected that a certain naive comfort had set into the population as a whole. I actually remember one person rolling his eyes when I asked "doesn't the market fluctuate?" No one would ever say "no," but the smile said it all: "there's no guarantee, BUT..."
Jen and I have been told many times by various financial advisers, well-wishers and strangers alike that money would best serve us when put into the market rather than into our home. I even almost cracked a few times. In my head, I began to suspect that maybe we were missing the train by shoving extra funds into prepayments on our home. I even remember one advisor giving me a condescending smile while showing the math based on a 10% return as opposed to money "under-utilized." No one ever questioned the regular growth. At least not really.
To Jen's credit, she wouldn't let me waiver.
My point? I guess it's that pattern behavior eventually leads to trouble because its based on assumptions. Twelve percent growth per year became such a pattern for many investors that no one ever thought, "how could this continue when people are piling up the kind of debt that would give a healthy man a heart attack?" To be fair, no one has asked that until now.
I've often asked anyone in ear shot "how did everyone miss that we were heading for financial ruin? Aren't these CEOs, financial gurus, regulators and overcompensated boards of directors supposed to know what they are doing?"
I've never been one to trust the undefinable "them" anyway, but surely SOMEONE must have seen the signs. Apparently Warren Buffett gave warnings, and I'm sure others did too, but what's a warning when graphs show a generation of growth? After all, the charts I've seen indicate growth that has been almost unfettered for 80 years or more.
I remember learning through quantitative reasoning that an assertion that, "the sun will rise tomorrow because it rose yesterday" was, by definition, a fallacy. No one doubts that tomorrow will bring light, but we can't quantitatively prove it will happen. We take it on pattern and faith. One could also say physics, but we can't know if a meteor will stop tomorrow, so even that is not a certainty. 99% does not equal 100%.
So, while we try to pick up the pieces and unwind the mess we've made, I am left to wonder where we go from here? Maybe, just maybe, we hit the very limit of growth through overuse and over-extension of credit. Maybe we've grown this far ONLY because we were so willing as a people to incur so much debt.
I don't know the answer, but easy credit provides an illusion that we have more than we ever really do. And, eventually, the bill comes due and there is no where else left to turn. It ruins marriages, it strains health and it leads to the kind of bust we are now witnessing.
The only way I think we can ever prevent this kind of crisis from happening again is if recovery leads to responsible use of credit and we stop basing our lives on the fallacy that "past performance guarantees future results." How about this time we don't forget that the market fluctuates.
But, before I get ahead of myself, we need to get through this mess first. Lest I assume recovery before it happens.
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