Yesterday MJ (who was in town for the weekend to revisit our awesome days in Chicago, yay!) and I went to a little-regarded place in Chicago called the Garfield Conservatory- a greenhouse-like building that showcases various types of plants and flowers- and of course had a great time. Apparently Garfield Park has a bad reputation among most Chicago people and it's located on the green line, the bastard child of Chicago CTA lines (red line cuts through the city and hits both baseball stadiums, orange and blue runs run to the airports, and brown is the most scenic), but both times we've gone we've had a blast.
There's a grass formation on the lawn of the Garfield Conservatory that taught me the difference between a maze and a labyrinth. Yes, there apparently is a different. A maze has many false endings and ways you can get lost, but labyrinth has just one way to get in, one way to get out, despite its windy and circuitous nature. They both have a sort of "target" within the center of its layout. What a metaphor for life, a vague, undefined, well hidden goal at the heart of a huge structure that we're all try to get to, like the pursuit of happiness in life. To get there, some might prefer mazes, or some might prefer labyrinths. Mazes have a lot of surprises, lots of failures, but among those failures some turn out to be lessons in how to find the right path, whereas a labyrinth is one track, single-minded, no surprises (except there was a Minotaur or something roaming around that could cause certain death? Seems kind of hazardous). Some people bounce around one, two, maybe many different jobs before finding the right career, others go to a medical school-track program right out of high school and never stop until they've gotten their residency. Personally, the maze route seems more interesting (and is in fact what I've done, bouncing around and experiencing many different jobs) and stimulating, as long as in the end you get to the pot of gold at the center of the maze just like a labyrinth. There's more adjusting, disappointment but then recovery and resiliency against disappointment, but it definitely makes me feel more appreciation if and when I do make it to the end, that golden goal of "achievement."
The stock market's definitely a maze. It's by no means a straight line up (although based on the last 9 years of charts, it sure has seemed like it). It goes up and down without any noticeable pattern, often with forward progress yielding to sudden and unexpected pit falls before climbing out of it and going forward. I'm trying to decide whether I should just go with the labyrinth approach (buy and hold, through all the good and bad times, weathering the storm and just hold onto all invests) or the maze approach (ditch the bad stocks, try to find the good ones, actively manage the portfolio). It certainly would make me less anxious to go with a low-return labyrinth route, but it also might be less profitable.
Personally, if I were a kid, (and I'm kind of a big kid still) I'd prefer mazes. Why go through that whole big mess of a garden/ prison with walls called a labyrinth if you can't venture out a bit, get lost and have to figure it out? I've often told people I don't want to feel like a rat in a maze to describe taking the same route to work every morning, or doing the same routine every day, I'm sure the rat understands. But what I meant to say was I don't want to be a rat in a labyrinth fighting to get to that cheese....you're going to get it, but you didn't work for it, you just followed a path down that seems predestined, preordained.
Fantasize on,
Robert Yan
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