On the Fence

June '09 Beirut, Lebanon. Fence covered in political posters of Prime Minister Saad Hariri.

I am still on the fence about killing the blog.

My thoughts as I wander through the world often drift to [bxA] globalization, the information age and being overwhelmed. Celebrities are checking into rehab for anxiety. Prescription drugs are the new pot.

This is what happens when people think too much.

We’re overwhelmed and too busy to notice. There’s too much to do. Too much information. We’ve gone overboard, and I don’t mean in the cool-fun Goldie Hawn / Kurt Russell kinda way.

When I started at the bank in Houston almost ten years ago, one of my favorite bosses told me about when he started as an analyst 10+ years earlier. Before the internet analysts had to walk to the library and get archived newspapers on microfiche to research historical stock prices of the companies they covered.

July '09 Houston, Texas USA - Skyline shot from a Ferris wheel car at the downtown aquarium.

In 2000, we were punching the 3-letter stock ticker into our keyboard and pulling up Everything There Is to Know about our companies available on various financial news websites. Instantaneous results.

Then there was my grandmother who, when she was alive, went to three different family owned stores to get her weekly groceries: bread from the bakery, meat from the butcher, that kind of thing. She didn’t have a dishwasher. My sister and I were exasperated by these inefficiencies.

Karma yoga is when you do a task slowly in selfless service with full devotion. Even if you’re not expressly on a path to enlightenment, it gives your mind a chance to chill out.

Photo: October ’09 – Sivananda Kutir Ashram, India. Keren from Tel Aviv doing daily karma yoga outside my dorm. I would love to visit her in Israel but then I couldn’t go back to Lebanon with an Israeli stamp in my passport.

There was a time in my life when these profound duties were called “chores” and I didn’t have the money to outsource them to Molly Maid or fly to foreign countries where swamis would assign them to me.

Those ten minutes it took my former boss to walk back from the library to the office circa 1980s were minutes his mind got to process and reflect on the historical stock price – the zig zag line not unlike a heartbeat on a monitor, showing spikes during booms, dips during busts – and in the case of the bank’s energy portfolio, the ever perplexing story of the world’s dependence on fossil fuels.

Photo: Militant groups in the Niger Delta target multinational oil firms (2008).

The more information we have, the more there is to think about and the less time there is to think about it.

April ’10 – Ko Phi Phi, Thailand.

Unless we stop for a while.