the farmer and the trader

i was walking in nyc this morning. i'd been around for a while just absorbing the city the way you do when you're somewhere that feels bigger than you. i ended up near wall street—not because i had to go there, but because i was joining a friend of mine for a run.

it was 6:00 am. the street was still dark and quiet, almost unusually so for new york. i was probably the only person passing through at that moment. that's when i saw a guy alone, leaning against a wall. right under a spotlight. i saw him take some drugs (maybe cocaine idk), right there in front of me, not caring at all. and then almost immediately after, he started crying. not discreetly. this was the kind of crying you don't see evryday , the kind that tells you something has genuinely broken. he saw me, and called out. i was the only one there. my first instinct was to keep walking—because i felt not very confortable. but he looked destroyed, like a man at the very end of something. so i stopped. i don't entirely know why. i just felt like i had to hear what he had to say.

that's when the conversation started.

he looked tired. we started talking the way strangers sometimes do in new york—briefly, then suddenly not briefly at all. he told me he'd been in finance as a trader for almost twenty one years. he told me last night had wiped out more money than most people will see in a lifetime. more than millions. he wasn't angry. that's what struck me. he was just—empty. like something had been removed from him overnight and he hadn't yet figured out what to replace it with.

i thought about that conversation for the rest of the day.

somewhere in the back of my mind came a story i'd read just recently from the buddhist monk, thích nhất hạnh. (cf. no mud no lotus).in this book he mention a story pretty similar to this situation.

buddha was walking along a road when a farmer came running toward him, frantic, desperate—he'd lost his twelve cows, his harvest had failed, and he was contemplating ending his life. buddha listened, told him he hadn't seen his cows, and watched him run off in anguish. he then turned to his disciples and said, quietly—aren't you glad you don't own any cows?

i keep coming back to that trader. twenty one years of his life poured into something that disappeared. a man who had everything the world told him to chase—and there he was, in the richest area in the world, alone on a quiet street, numbing himself just to get through the morning, crying in front of a stranger because there was no one else there.

and i keep asking myself a question that maybe i unconsciously don't entirely want to answer. what are my cows? what am i holding onto so tigthly that losing it would leave me on that same wall, in that same state, with nothing left but the hope that someone passes by?

i don't have millions. i don't have twenty one years poured into trading. but somehow i felt free.