Investment Advisors

How-to guidance. It’s everywhere. It’s published in books. It’s slathered all over the internet. Friends dish it out. Family members offer it unsolicited. As if we should always be improving. Today we should be a better version of ourselves than yesterday. Really?

That’s tough word, should. Many of us bristle when we hear it. Most of us duck when it’s launched in our direction. We don’t like being told what to do. And we really react to someone else giving us advice on how we should live our lives. Now, maybe they are older and presumably wiser. Maybe they want to help. But no one person has all the answers to navigating every possible sticky wicket we humans might encounter as we muddle through Monday and tumble into Tuesday.

We are all pretty free to make choices for ourselves as we wobble through Wednesday and tread into Thursday. Ok, showing up for work may not be all that glamorous but it’s directly related to receiving a steady paycheck. Plodding through the aisles of a grocery store might not tickle our fancy but we like to eat and it’s a luxury to have the fixings available for purchase. Helping a friend move a sofa isn’t high on most people’s list of pleasurable activities but this person just had open heart surgery and we’d hope for the same if we were in their shoes. A neighbor’s spouse dies unexpectedly and we don’t feel prepared or qualified to do much good but we go anyway just to be there.

Showing up. Going. Being there. It’s all about investment. Time spent. Money spent. Energy spent. And, sliding through that kind of Saturday, we are too. But we’ve had plenty of investment advisors. Our calendars. Our feet. Our bank accounts. Our vehicles. Our guts. Our hearts. Colluding and collaborating. Guiding and goading. Motivating and moving. We choose. We give. And neither we nor the world around us are the same.

Rob Bell wrote this great book titled "How to Be Here.” Yeah, a how-to book. In the first section of the book, he writes about boredom and cynicism, both of which he says are “lethal.” And then he throws in despair. Two little pages and there they are, these viruses infecting vitality. He writes, “Boredom says, There’s nothing interesting to make here.” Cynicism says, There’s nothing new to make here. Despair says, Nothing that we make matters. Boredom, cynicism, and despair are spiritual diseases because they disconnect us from the most primal truth about ourselves – that we are here.” Bell then begs the question of any good investment advisor: “How are you going to respond to this life you have been given? What are you going to do with it?” It’s one day’s investment after another. Quite the marvel, isn’t it?