I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Sunday Planning, I plan for the week ahead.
Heraclitus said something like, “You can’t step in the same river twice.” Actual fragments from his work say something a bit more complicated. Here’s one I like:
On those stepping into rivers staying the same other and other waters flow.
The rivers are staying the same but other waters flow. There is the river, and there is the flow.
I started thinking of stocks versus flows yesterday. I had tried to improve upon a painting that I already really loved because I wanted to submit it to a show. But in trying to take it beyond the resolution it had already reached, I ruined it. Finally I decided to just paint it over with white.
I also did a quick Tarot reading yesterday in which the King of Wands appeared in a place of guidance, and a couple days ago the Queen of Wands appeared instead of the Queen of Pentacles, who had been routinely present in my readings.
Pentacles are the suit of earth, of resources, of material wealth. Wands are the suit of creative fire, of what you create out of your material resources. Pentacles are a suit of acquisition and preservation — of stock. Wands are a suit of transformation, of action — of flows.
You need both. You need a river to step into and you want that river to be moving, active, changing. You don’t want stagnancy.
Stock enables flows. Canvases, tubes of acrylic paint, paintbrushes become paintings that I love or do not love, that I show or do not show, that I gift or hang in my house, or maybe even put out with the Monday trash for pickup.
My house is stock. It provides a place for flow. My mother and daughter lived with me when I first bought it. Then they moved out — first my daughter to an apartment near the University of Denver, where she was pursuing a master’s degree in social work. Then my mother to a senior living place, after her husband died, so she could socialize more with people her own age. A year and a half passed. My daughter moved back in, having finished her MSW and found her first job in the field. My mother moved to a different senior living place. People’s lives flowing, mine too.
Living with more flow
How can you live with more flow? That’s the question I started asking myself yesterday.
With possessions
It’s hard to let things go that you spent money on and that mean something to you. But letting what you no longer need out of your life makes room for your future to show up. It means your things can possibly become other people’s things.
I have been holding onto the guitar I used for two years of group lessons at Swallow Hill, along with all the guitar music I learned with. It’s time to let that go, let it flow. I don’t play guitar anymore. I paint, I write, I trade.
I need to trust in my becoming, and that includes being willing to let go of who I am no longer.
With friendships
Social media treats people like objects to collect, as friends or followers on a dashboard. It counts them, making it seem like more is better, when, in this case, more is just more (unless you are trying to monetize your presence on that platform).
Instead, a focus on the flow of relationship means taking time regularly to check in, to get together, to catch up. It means making plans for getting together.
With money
Especially when you retire, it’s easy to look at money as a stock not a flow: you have a nest egg, and you want to see it gradually grow bigger and bigger.
Instead, I’m considering the flow of money, and how it moves. How can I use it to live a better life? How can I trust in the abundance of life that I will have enough? In my options wheeling, how do I keep the wheel moving and generating new capital? In my portfolio stewardship how do I encourage not stagnancy but vitality?
In writing
My daily blog is flow oriented. I don’t labor over any particular post; I just show up each morning and allow it to flow out of me. Sometimes it flows easily; other times not so much.
I’m not trying to create something lasting with this 1000-day project. I’m documenting my flowing life and the ideas that arise and disappear.
By doing that I have created a stock though. I link to old posts. I go find them when I want to feel inspired or reread a quote that helped me in the past and might help me now.
In my art practice
I have so many finished paintings. Each represents some work I did and some though I had about how to make art. But it’s dangerous to treat them as more than they are: as some sort of valuable inventory.
I dated a man whose mother was an artist. She had tremendous amounts of her art in her house. He and his brothers didn’t know what to do with it all. Try to sell it? She was an accomplished artist, but there is no lack of good art available in the world. You can’t sell that.
Here’s an idea: the important outcome of my art is not the art itself, but how it transforms me, and those around me.
My art inspires on a one-on-one basis. But no, that’s not accurate: the fact that I do art and dedicate myself to it: that’s what inspires. The activity, not the output.
Who I am becoming
A stock-oriented view of the individual asks: Who am I in this world? What are my accomplishments? What can I be proud of? What do people admire in me, or envy?
A flow-oriented view asks: Who am I becoming right now? Where have I been? How is my present action in the world contributing, regularly? What identity am I ready to shed now, in order to become someone new?
My house
I love the house I live in right now. I picked it out all by myself: the first time I’ve done that ever. The first few houses I lived in I purchased with my ex-husband. I bought my divorce house from my dad, so he had picked it out. I loved it, but it wasn’t really my choice but rather his, when he had bought it.
This house — this golf course neighborhood house with the two-story family room shaded by tall aspen, with an upstairs loft that serves as a studio, with a giant primary suite on the main floor, with a basement like a mini-apartment for my loved ones to live in — it is mine, all mine.
And yet it will flow out of my life someday. I don’t need to hold onto it forever.
I might move to Taos. I might decide I want to live in a senior living apartment, like my mom does now. I might meet someone and move in with them. I might decide a 4000 square foot house is too much for me all by myself and downsize into something else.
applying to a show, or not
I’m still on the fence as to whether to submit an application for the show that I was thinking of when I decided I could improve upon Shipwrecked by adding just a bit more alizarin crimson and cadmium(-free) yellow medium. I have paintings I like (and one I love) that I could submit.
But I’m wondering more and more if I want to lean more into achievement minimalism. I’m wondering if the electric charge I feel from contemplating a submission to a juried show is less about that being who I want to become and more about trying to get external validation for my output.
I don’t enjoy participating in shows. I don’t enjoy finishing the paintings (sometimes spending significant money to get them framed), taking them to dropoff, or attending opening or closing receptions. I don’t enjoy the announcement of the show awards, even when I win one. I don’t enjoy wondering whether my piece was an “ok well I guess we could include this one” or an enthusiastic, “wow I really love that!” It takes me out of myself and my practice.
This is the lesson of Shipwrecked I think: that my art practice is enough without the shows, without selling, with just the fact of doing it day after day. That’s similar to my blogging. I don’t do it for external validation. I do it because it helps my life flow well and it helps me become who I am.
And the lesson of Shipwrecked is that sometimes things enter out lives (often through our own efforts) and then leave before we are ready for them to (sometimes because of our own actions, which I won’t call mistakes here).
That’s the nature of a flowing life.
This week’s plans
My main focus last week was on developing a new plan for my retirement portfolio. I’ve decided to manage it myself and become one-in-herself with respect to my overall money management.
I’m adapting Meb Faber’s tactical asset allocation approach which uses simple timing rules to enter and exit a set of asset sleeves. I’ve defined a portfolio of 16 ETFs that cover a variety of strategies and factors (e.g., large cap U.S. momentum, 10-year U.S. treasuries, international real estate). And then I’m going to rebalance weekly in 25% tranches, as per this update to Faber’s model.
Doing something like this has only become possible because I can use AI to build an app to manage it. Otherwise it would be too unwieldy. Yes, I could build a spreadsheet system for it. I did that for my options trading, but I found that automating the tracking made it so that I could actually keep up with the rules I had set out for myself.
This week, I’m going to continue to build the application that supports both my options trading and my longer-term portfolio management. I will likely need to postpone to September actually starting the weekly rebalancing.
I have a few art projects in progress, and I’ll work on those.
I might do some writing-for-sharing vs what I do here: writing-for-reflecting.
I’m reading two books right now: Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou, given to me by my son, and Woman’s Mysteries: Ancient and Modern by Jungian psychoanalyst M. Esther Harding.
And I’ve started working out at the gym again — so I’ll keep up with that.
Have a great week!