I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Monday Musings, I write freely and wanderingly about some topic that’s on my mind.
About a week ago, facing retinal surgery, I wrote about my desire (and intention) to become carefree, both in my trading and in my life in general.
I do lead a carefree life already. I’m retired from a corporate career in technology. I have enough money to live on comfortably. My house is in great shape, and my health is improving, since two surgeries and a course of physical therapy for my shoulder this year. My social relationships are solid and sustaining.
Combining elements of my life properly
Today I want to extend my intention towards carefreeness to include a proper and easy balancing of all elements of life, starting from the inspiration of the Temperance Tarot card. The Temperance card suggests a flow of life that mixes together the philosophical and spiritual with the real world, bringing it together in a magical way that overcomes boundaries, that walks a middle way of everything in just the right amount.
The word temperance derives from the Latin verb temperare which means “to set limits,” “to moderate,” or “to mix in proper proportions.” Most people know it only in its sense of moderation, especially in relation to consuming alcohol. I want to think of it today in terms of mixing in proper proportions.
The card shows a person of indeterminate gender pouring water from one cup to another along a diagonal (impossible!) The person has wings like an angel, and a kind of halo around their golden, curly coif. In the distance, a sun rises over mountains, linked to the foreground scene by an easily traversible path. The angel’s right foot is in water and the left foot on land. Irises bloom by the side of the small pond.
This card calls for you to bring your full self authentically to your life, not siloing it into discrete non-overlapping sections. You need not create separate personalities for different aspects of your life. You can drop the social personas that previously you used to cope and to succeed.
According to Rachel Pollack in Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, the pathway on the card links the realm of spirituality and abstract philosophy represented by the mountains to real life represented by the small pond surrounded by flowers in bloom:
The road especially signifies return. We have gone down into the self and now we are making our way back to involvement with the outer world, enriched….
The angel stands with one foot on land, one foot in water. As the water represents the unconscious so the land symbolizes the ‘real world’ of events and the other people. The Temperate personality acting from an inner sense of life, links the two realms. The water also indicates potentiality, that is, the possibilities of life, while the land symbolizes manifestation or actuality.
Getting into flow
Of course the standard psychological idea of flow is the one promoted by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and he used the concept to mean being in a zone, being fully engaged, by some physical or mental activity.
I found myself getting into flow with my trading today, trading in a carefree way along the lines of what I described a week ago yesterday in my becoming carefree post. But I’m not following the rules I outlined in that post. I’m not cutting losers short, because with short puts, that’s too likely to get me out during a dip, when there are profits to be made by holding on. Instead, I’m back to rules that are very close to what I originally started with:
- Sell puts at around .20 to .25 delta
- Choose expirations of 25-55 days
- Hold onto them even when they are in losses – rolling out for a net credit around 14 DTE if possible, or just hold and take assignment if can’t roll for a net credit
- But choose tickers that have strong bullish underlying trends, and ones that ideally have just pulled back to a support
I find this a pretty carefree way to trade but I guess we will see how I feel if my portfolio sees a bunch of losses on the short puts again like I saw before. That won’t feel good. But I’m gaining equanimity all the time.
Flow otherwise
A daily routine contributes to flow and helps me ensure that I’m mixing all parts of my life in the proper proportions. I can’t walk the dogs right now due to my retinal surgery recovery, but I’m keeping up with other activities such as cleaning the house, maintaining the garden, catching up with friends and family, reading fiction (latest: Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler), and blogging.
I don’t feel that my life lacks anything, which is a wonderful feeling. And I don’t feel there is too much of anything either. I am blessed with Temperance.