Panic Attacks

We love the art at Highland because it gives us visual clues how to live our daily lives. 

The Buddha head at Highland’s east entry with green moss growing on it reminds us to calm down and breath before we enter the building to start work. But hidden in the bushes there is a Pan sculpture to remind us chaos is the order of the universe, and that today's concept of “72-and-sunny” as the norm is an illusion that can be shattered at any moment.

In ancient Greek religion and mythology Pan is the god of the wild, with hindquarters, legs and horns of a goat. He is often affiliated with sex, and represents not just panic and destruction, but fertility and the season of spring. Peter Pan, and words like panic and pandemic are derivatives of Pan’s name.

While the Coronavirus pandemic is creating a global panic on many fronts, it is important to remember the world is governed by unseen, omnipresent powers that could be appeased, but never controlled; that risk can be moved, but not removed.  

Until recently, it was understood “panics are the indispensable hygiene of markets, sweeping the investing landscape clean after every orgy of prosperity.” By now it should be clear "our economy cannot subsist without sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind of a financial crises multiple times in each generation.” Remember Jefferson’s advice for a revolution every twenty years. In fact, in a healthy organic cycle, entrepreneurs who by their nature believe business conditions will continue to improve forever, “become centers of infection and start an epidemic of optimism.”

So here’s how we are coping. We wash our hands often, and have started taking showers too!! We are neither afraid nor elated. We are not only surviving, but busy planting the seeds that allow us to thrive in the future. We are on solid financial footing, and while looking for opportunities, we try to remember "bottom fishing is the most expensive sport in the world." In short, we think the dominos have just started falling, and that Pan and his destructive forces will continue causing havoc before the season of rebirth is upon us. Meanwhile, if moved, read this week’s article below titled “ A Coronavirus Great Awakening.”