Goal for the Week: Be Free of Goals

I started thinking late last week that I am too attached to the outcome of my trades. By which I mean, when I have trades on, I obsess over each tick. I think it’s a natural inclination, since enough ticks have to go in my favor to keep me in food and shelter. But, it’s also a useless practice. Worse than useless, it’s actually stress, which is harmful.

I am not talking about heart-pounding, debilitating stress. I worked through that long ago, and detailed my battle with trading stress in another article. Still, I have concluded that even a little stress is too much. So, after some reading on the topic, I decided I will simply let go of it.

Yeah, right… that word simply doesn’t seem to fit a task like that. It is a sort of zen paradox, that it takes literally no effort to drop our attachment to things beyond our control, and yet at the same time it is very difficult to do so. So, in preparation for this week, all weekend I have been practicing getting into a generally zen mindful state. To me, it feels like an extension of meditation.

I am a long-time meditator. I started out meditating on an object, or a piece of music–just anything I could attempt to focus on completely. Eventually I “graduated” to letting my mind stand still, and empty. I think this is generally considered to be a much harder type of meditation to do. At least, I can say it was very difficult for me, and sometimes I still have to start with an object and work my way up to it.

The reason I bring that up, is that what I’ve been practicing feels to me like I’m meditating all day. I’d say it’s really great, but I’m not supposed to label things! :-) I focus entirely on the present moment, and just do whatever it is I am doing. I experience it as fully as I can. No distractions. No multitasking. No “chatter” in my head about the past or the future. No “chatter” in my head about labelling the present. I definitely did not achieve 100% mind purity, but there were stretches of time where I “got it.” Interestingly enough, I’m failing at it right now, because the way I write is mainly by filtering and critiquing some directed mental chatter. Oops! See how I give up my inner peace for you people? :-)

Two books that really helped me understand these concepts are Practicing the Power of Now and the rather unfortunately named Complete Idiot’s Guide to Zen Living. Of the two, the guide is more comprehensive, so it might make sense to read it first. On the other hand, I read Practicing the Power of Now first, and found it to be the more inspirational and exciting book. You might say, inspirational and exciting enough to make you want to read more books on the subject. I didn’t link to it because I can’t find it on amazon, but I have the audio book version, and I listen to it every month or so while taking a long walk. It’s good stuff, but I’d always thought of it as an aid to meditation until now. Now I am approaching it as a way to be.

I have said before, and see others claim, that meditation is great because of the way the peaceful quiet mind allows them to get reset, refreshed, and re-centered. Well, why partition your time so that you only have that for a few minutes a day? Why not just have a peaceful, quiet mind all the time? Why not just be centered, rather than have to periodically get re-centered? It seems kind of obvious to me now.

I will say, as with my early experience with meditation, it’s not particularly easy at this early stage. I have found that when I slip up and let my mind start wandering, it seems to wander extra hard (if that makes any sense). Also, when a negative thought creeps through, it seems to have extra force, or feels stronger than I think it should have. That could be either a kind of mental pressure building up, or it could just be that it is more jarring to my internal state compared to the quiet I just had. I can’t tell. Regardless, I believe that, as with meditation, it will soon become second nature. I just have to stick with it for awhile.