I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Sunday Planning, I plan for the week ahead.
It’s Valentine’s Day week! Valentine’s Day is this coming Saturday, and I will be going with my daughter, Ray, and maybe Ray’s daughter to have dinner with my dad and his partner at his senior living facility. It’s become a tradition for us, and a really nice one, because it allows us to celebrate Valentine’s Day as about more than romantic love. My daughter and I look forward to it each year, and it’s nice to welcome new loved ones.
My mother used to always get me and my sisters valentines and little heart-shoped boxes of candy. I, in turn, did that for my children too. Looking back, that little gesture of care was more important than any romantic gifts I got.
There’s a little bit of snow on the way which should help improve ski conditions at Keystone, where I usually go. My Keystone Plus Pass is blacked out on Saturday and Sunday because it’s the President’s Day three-day weekend. As the snow is coming in little bits on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday and all days will be pretty cold I might wait until the next week to go.
I started yet another writing project: Reckless Investing, a weekly newsletter with daily-ish notes about what I’m doing and what I’m learning in managing my investment portfolio. I leave about half of my portfolio to an asset manager. He’s compensated .50% of the assets under management each year, not bad. So far this year, the return for the account he managed is over 7%. My return is less, but I am managing the money I’m living on, so it is less aggressively allocated.
Yesterday, for the daily note, I went a little overboard and wrote an almost 1200 word article on the Japanese snap elections happening today and what they might mean for investors, even those who are only in U.S. stocks and bonds. Japanese prime minister Sanae Takaichi and her party, the Liberal Democrat Party (LDP), allied with the Japan Innovation Party, are projected to win 274 of the 465 seats in the House of Representatives, all up for re-election today. Takaichi seeks to win a mandate to make big changes in how Japan is run, importantly to include modifying the constitution to allow Japan to increase its military spending and take a more active role on the world stage militarily.
I don’t typically expect my daily notes to be so long, but in order to understand complicated situations that I have little background in sometimes I will have to do a lot of background to make sense of what I’m investigating.
I plan to send a weekly long-form article to email subscribers with links to any daily notes I’ve written, so as not to flood people’s inboxes with the effluence from my brain.
I’ve regained momentum with my painting, having started a new series called Mechanism that presents mechanical abstracts. I finished a second one yesterday, and will be photographing the two finished pieces along with some additional Motion Memory paintings.
I drew The World yesterday in a Tarot reading, and that’s how I feel right now.
In Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, Rachel Pollack writes of the world:
What can we say of an understanding, a freedom and rapture beyond words? The unconscious known consciously, the outer self unified with the forces of life, knowledge that is not knowledge at all, but a constant ecstatic dance of being – they are all true and yet not true….
Everything in the universe moves, the Earth around the sun, the sun within the galaxy, the galaxies in clusters, all cycling around each other. There is no centre, no place where we can say, ‘Here it all began, here it all stops.’ Yet the centre exists, everywhere, for in a dance the dancer does not move around any arbitrary point in space, but rather the dance carries its own sense of unity focused around a constantly moving, constantly peaceful centre. Nothing and everything all at once….
The dancer has not lost her physical being, her root in material, sexual reality. Instead, the energy is constantly flowing, transformed and renewed.
Yes, this — living with a peaceful center, with energy flowing through me — dancing through my life.