Necessary Evils
We all know intellectually that things can’t be good forever.
“All good things come to an end.”
I think there’s a step beyond just tolerating this truth. There’s also a perfection to necessary evil.
Bear markets, corrections, recessions allow all of us to rebalance our portfolios, buy the stuff that hasn’t done well, sell some of the stuff that has. Deploy lazy money, too. They are truly necessary – not just something to tolerate.
As someone who loves competitive golf – my addiction is not winning. It’s the failure that makes room for me to improve. The act of building what I think is right, falling on my face, sifting through what works/what doesn’t.
Order, disorder, reorder.
Relationships come and go – some by choice, some by death, some by default. All creating space for something that didn’t exist before.
Of course, we all know this. Accepting is hard, seeing the beauty can be even more challenging. This might quite literally mean seeing pleasure and pain as one in the same.
Discomfort – stock market turmoil, relationship fluctuation, bad rounds of any sport, less than desirable results all have a tragic beauty that reveal anger, anxiety, and melancholy.
But, with patience, we invest less in that discomfort, stunt the perpetuation, and allow for growth.
This is counter to blaming, taking something personally, or wondering ‘why me’.
Long-term optimism involves not just acceptance, but actively choosing to embrace, forgive, and invite the bad-news-du-jour.
Stocks don’t know that you own them. People don’t generally try to hurt others – they’re just busy working through their own shit. And the golf course and my golf clubs don’t hate me.
With patience, we become sifters. Taking the good, learning from the bad, and shaping the new.
To our surprise, that ‘new’ likely deeply resembles the old. We don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. We likely stick to the plan with some rounded and softened edges, the life plot-line up and to the right.
Investing in anything is a long-term venture with some necessary evils.
Thanks for reading.
Mitch