Reflections

Growth

I experience the sacred when I lose myself in a workout. Attempting to lift a heavy weight not only is a test of the limits of my body but of my mind. I am building my muscles by breaking them down, like the way a meditator scans their body to gain more self awareness. Like the way nature evolves by getting rid of the old. It’s a way to put a metric on my own growth as a person.

Balance

I experience balance without trying. I think that balance is just a natural state. Like how the height of a tree is correlated with the depth of its roots. Like how every effort will have its costs and tradeoffs. Sitting in nature or just sitting and looking within myself, I will see balance arise. There is even balance as I look in front of me at the computer screen typing. Fundamentally, I think that the idea of being off balance is a lie. What’s really happening is that one wishes to achieve a different set of goals and or outcomes, but their efforts have been placed in the wrong places. And then when the idea of balance is actually achieved, that’s just a state of contentment from having achieved a set of goals. In finance, there is the idea of the balance sheet where assets are equal to liabilities plus shareholders equity. The intuition behind this idea seems to suggest that any business action will always have a balance, tradeoff, or consequence. I think that this is true in life too. One can even argue that life is just a game of figuring out what’s worth spending time and energy on to get certain goals which is ultimately a lesson about balance. Even looking at the financial example before, one’s intuition leads to balance in mathematical equations, so even the language of nature seems to be established with balance.

Art

I think that everyone ought to call themselves an artist. I think that art is essentially the act of doing something just for its own sake. This is essentially how the best work is done, with no prior judgements. Something that I would like to add more to my life is the art of listening more. This means listening more to my heart and not so much my head, but also to listen more to music and sounds, podcasts and other people as well. I really want to listen more to music that I enjoyed when I was younger. The need to identify myself with a college major or a group of people made me forget about the inherent musical curiosity that I already had growing up and it would be enriching for me to revisit that. Also playing music would be fun to revisit as well since I invested a large part of my life in that.