A few weeks ago, I was riding my temperamental mare in my friend’s arena. My friend is a horse trainer, and he and my girl friend Amber were sitting on their horses at the gate to the arena, apparently happy to watch my temperamental mare try to toss me off her back. Up and down I would go, but, try as she might (truthfully, if she really wanted me to eat dirt …), I remained in the saddle. Each time I would go up, I would land back in the saddle solidly and with my balance in tact. Later, as I calmed her down, and we actually rode around the arena, I pulled up to the voyeuristic pair to see them chuckling. Eric (the trainer) said, “Wow! Several times, we could see lots of air between your butt and the saddle.” Amber chimed in with her often-sideways support and said laughingly, “Yeh, we thought you were going to eat sand several times.”
Putting aside the fact that to them my bouncing around the arena was humorous, I will say that when all was over, and I had some time to think about it, I realized something a bit esoteric, but still quite enlightening about trading, or any discipline one seeks to master for that matter.
I have discussed the intuitive side of trading before, but after that “riding” experience, the power of intuitive thinking in any endeavor is now much clearer in my mind. You see, when Shawna (my temperamental mare) was trifling with my body and my balance, I did not fly off because my riding skills are so engrained in my psyche that I never thought about what I should do each time she bucked me into the air. Thinking back on the experience, I simply kept my mental cool (no fear), flexed my leg muscles to soften the landing, pulled in my hands, kept my back straight, my head up, and relaxed right back into the saddle. Now, the only reason I can explain this to you so precisely now is that I thought about what one needs to do to keep his or her balance when going straight up into the air on the back of the horse. What worked for me then will work for anyone in that situation. The interesting thing is that I actually had to recreate the moment in my head to establish what I was doing. This, my friends, is an intuitive response to a situation, an unthinking response based on what I have learned about being in that place so many times in my riding career. Okay, so this is fairly standard knowledge – no great epiphany here. No, the truly interesting thing is how I characterized the knowledge in my head.
You see, in any discipline, one has to become intuitively linked to the act itself, but, often, the intuition is characterized as a mindless action/reaction response. True, the response does happen without conscious thought, but the response is not about action or reaction; it is about interaction.
Think about it this way. Professional dancers, Olympic gymnasts, and all great entertainers or athletes do not act or react in their process. No, each is one with the act itself, and their motion, or lack of motion, is thoughtlessly timed to fit precisely into the existing space of the moment. The word to describe this is fluidity. All the masters of any discipline respond fluidly to any and all situations because they have repetitively performed the myriad responses to all the possible moments in their process. They interact with the process itself.
So, from now on, I will look at my trading in this light. Am I acting or reacting in response to the market (my horse), or am I interacting in that place of fluidity so natural and unconscious that I simply let it all unfold according to a plan I have repeated time and time again? Something to think about, if it is not to up in the air for you…
Trade in the day; invest in your life …
