Haecceity

Haecceity. I love that word - the essence of the uniqueness of something. But I'm not sure it ever really exists. I'm not sure that essence is ever unique, or that uniqueness is ever essential. As applied to people:

Everyone has at least two 'layers' - levels of being, of haecceity: How they appear to others, and how they appear to themselves. Almost everyone has a third level in between these - how they want to appear to others. I do not have the audacity to suggest a level of 'how they really are', but there is certainly a more important fourth level on the bottom - how they appear to God. You cannot have a true relationship unless you can get past the outer layers. But usually this hurts. The outer layers are there for a reason.

Investing

The one rule in investing that everyone agrees on seems to be to keep your portfolio in balance. This means that based on your appetite for risk, you proportion your investments among different assets. As a simple example, say you want 50% stocks and 50% bonds. Suppose your stocks do well for a year or two, while your bonds languish. At the end of two years, you have 60% stocks and 40% bonds. At this point, you are supposed re-balance your investments by transferring 10% from stocks to bonds.

This means, if you didn't notice, that when one investment is doing well, you should not throw more money at it, but take money away from it. If you are making money in stocks, you should take some of that and put it in bonds, which are loosing money. In general, this suggests that if an investment is doing well, this is a strong indication that it will soon stop doing well, and vice versa. In other words, a fundamental rule of investing is that the best indication of a good investment is that it is doing poorly, and vice versa. I'm heading off right now to invest in Ames and Somalia.

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Edit: I thought I was kidding when I posted this, but I did a little research, and guess what popped up? This quote, for one thing:

"If the past is a guide, you might expect some of the worst performing stocks in the first decade of the 2000s to be among the best between 2010 and 2019." (USA Today)

Looks like I'll be hitting up American Airlines and Kodak Cameras.

01000101011101001

It seems to me that the digital world is over hyped. I would go so far as to say that history will look back on digital processing as the foible of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Nothing is binary - exclusively on or off - except in our imagination. I have been told that electrons, the building blocks of life, are neither here nor there until you look at them. Even in computers there is a transition stage for each switch where the current drops off or picks up, which must be accounted for. When we are finally able to progress to organic or natural processing, digital will be seen as horribly inefficient. Think of all the information that is lost when converting a continuous-time, indefinitely precise information stream into a finite sequence of zeros and ones. Preposterous.

P.S. Since I wrote this I came across this article. Who knows all that the future will bring?

Why Me?

Because He loved your fathers, therefore He chose their descendants after them.

—Deuteronomy 4:37

But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise.

 —1 Corinthians 1:27

It is easy to fall into the error of trying to find selfish reasons for why God choose you. But that goes against the whole point of choosing. It can't be anything you've done or will do. Thus when you look at Christians around the world, you'll find a few common characteristics, and a lot of variety. I'll leave the specifics to you. Because most of the attributes you'll find, such as sanctification, are a consequence, not cause, of God's choosing. I think the two verses above perfectly sum up the traits which remain. God chooses the lowly, not for anything in themselves, but for the sake of their forefathers and for His own name's sake.

One thing we can learn from this is how important relationships (see yesterday's post) are for us and for God.

Life is like a Game of Chess

An edifact from back when I was fascinated by the game of chess (probably 12th grade):

Life is like a game of chess:
You can’t see more than a couple steps ahead,
You can’t foresee all contingencies/possibilities,
You don’t know what others are planning on doing, and
You make mistakes and you can’t take them back.

God sees everything – past present, and future,
He knows all the possibilities,
He even knows what you are going to do, and
He never makes mistakes.
God is the better chess player – don't you want Him on your side?

Marionettes

Often I feel that life is perpetual dance to which my feet are enslaved but from which my mind is completely detached. I am compelled forward on a course as immutable as unknowable. It happens on a time that my path crosses that of another, and we each linger, momentarily diverted. But my mind can never conceive nor compass their ways, nor teach them to my feet, and neither can it communicate my ways to them, not knowing them itself. And so we pass on, each along our own course, whatever that may be. Must this always be so?

Addendum to Murphy's Laws

Sarregouset's First Law of Social Interaction
The greater the insistency of an explanation, the greater the intention of a cover-up.

Sarregouset's Second Law of Social Interaction
Amelodic humming is a sure sign of something weighing on the conscience.

Sarregouset's Third Law of Social Interaction
The only thing worse than being enslaved to someone else is to be enslaved to your own notion of their opinion of you.

Sarregouset's Fourth Law of Social Interaction
The more undeserved the compliment you are given, the more the giver wishes the same compliment were applied to himself.

Sarregouset's Last Law of Social Interaction
There are some things which a person cannot admit, even subconsciously, for it would break them. On such an issue, do not attempt to step between them and God.