sdrealtor and Russell, I’m glad you liked it, feel free to use it all you like. Nothing I write is inherently mine anyway, everything comes from another source or person or experience and combinations thereof. I will make it to the meetup, looking forward to that bottle and meeting you guys as well as many others. The statement has nothing to do with sheep/wolves, victims/suspects or predator/prey, it is about balance. It isn’t about being delirious or desperate, it is about finding peace understanding that what is happening is fine. It is a combination of Lao Tzu and a crazy horse lady I dated a few years ago. I tend to attract or am attracted to slightly crazy women who are little unconventional in their thinking, it is one of my many character flaws.
So here’s the backstory, a few years ago I’m dating that woman known as the crazy horse lady and we are at my parents house for dinner and they live adjacent to miles of open space. Their yard is attacked daily by bunnies and the driveways/patios are covered with droppings each morning. My folks had been trying to install fencing and other devices to preventing them from feasting and this girl says that it is “a bunny year.” I ask her what the hell does that mean and she explains that she has always lived on a ranch and some years are “bunny years” and some years are “coyote years.” That when there are good rains the bunnies flourish, the following year the few coyotes feast and then they have large litters that survive because of the plentiful food, the next year there are too many coyotes competing for fewer bunnies and perhaps it is a dry year, then the coyotes don’t have as large of litters and fewer pups survive and with less predators and a little more rain there will be a bunny year coming. The few surviving coyotes will have a feast and the cycle will repeat. She also insisted that erecting fencing will not keep the bunnies away but will impede the coming coyotes, that no intervention is better.
Later that year I read the Tao Te Chi, remembered the quote from the Lion King (the circle of life, Simba) combined the bunny year theory with a few Taoist principals and realized that all things ebb and flow. For some reason I’m typing last night and it sneaks in from the back of my mind and I realize as I type that the economic cycle and the bunny/coyote cycle have amazing similarities.
If your retirement funds were in bunnies or coyotes, you would get all crazy with the ebb and flow of their population. You would complain about the government erecting fences, think of shooting the coyotes or get mad at god for it not raining enough. But our money isn’t in bunnies and coyotes, it is in real estate and stocks, so we cannot appreciate or predict the ebb and flow because we have skin in the game and we have fear, fear blinds. Take a deep breath and a step back, when things become clear and you can see them happening before they do, it feels better and you can position yourself better, it’s just that simple.
