The last couple days has seen some cold temperatures in L.A., especially fueled by the strong wind blowing from the ocean breeze. I was walking on the street and saw someone chasing after a piece of paper that he had been holding; the paper kept dancing away as the man chased, the wind was that strong (Param i ganghada). It's a common sight in Illinois, but strong winds in Los Angeles are as unusual as rain......people freak out and aren't used to it.
Strong wind is a metaphor for life......most days are calm, tranquil lulling you into a false sense of security.......and then all of a sudden everything changes quickly like a tornado running through a town and tearing up buildings and houses. It's terrifying, the sheer tenacity of those hurricanes that rip through the coastal areas of America every year..... they seem to pop up on the radar suddenly and then next thing you see are CNN reports of a town evacuated and with strong winds, changing everything about the infrastructure and composition of a town that's been in existence for so many years, wiped out in a matter of hours.
Stock market- as I detailed before, it can change quickly, slow gains to make me happy for a while, but that doesn't mean the drop down will be gradual too.......it could be quick and devastating and leave me wondering why I wasted all that time on a stock that ultimately failed. Even in good times like this week when stocks were rebounding from the horrific windy conditions wiping out gains 2 weeks ago, Walmart suddenly and without warning fell 10% and wiped out all the steady 0.7% gains I had been receiving for the last few months I'd owned the stock, and now I'm in the red.
Strong winds happen in all facets of life. Relationships end within a few hours of a sudden violent argument; Job industries can be fine and plenty of people living under it as a source of income for their families but then suddenly new technology and/or Amazon comes along and breaks the industry irrevocably forever, never to come back. (The famous quote in computer science is that "software is eating the world." - Marc Andressen). Car crashes, terminal diagnosis from a doctor....
Windy conditions don't have to be bad, neither. In one swift motion of buying some lotto tickets and the numbers on the ticket being the winning numbers, life completely changes for some lucky people every few days......(Now it's almost every other night with 2 big lottos available in California). Everyone wants those sudden positive life changes and dreams about them, but it's just as likely, probably more likely, that a sudden negative life event comes and blows away all the good things that have happened up until then. Matt Damon famously said in the movie Dogma- "Life is just a series of events." Certainly those events dictate the way are lives go much more than the mundane common moments.
The suddenness of life's events, just like strong winds in California, make life unpredictable and someone terrifying- it can all change so suddenly. But at some deeper level I think humans thrive on those windy days, and respond to the wind, and eventually get used to it, are prepared for it, and get stronger by it, and become stronger than the wind.
Fantasize on,
Robert Yan
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