Holding the Center

We can be falcon, or falconer.

“So you’re not worried?” I asked. It was a get-to-know-you conversation with an advisor. Not big. Not small. Growing. Excited. The topic was “AI and Advisors.”

He laughed.

“When crazy stuff happens to my clients? I’m their ‘money person.’ I’m the one they can call, and trust.”

The Knothole

I think that the man is at a dead set who has got through a knot-hole or gateway where his sledge load of furniture cannot follow him. I cannot but feel compassion when I hear some trig, compact-looking man, seemingly free, all girded and ready, speak of his "furniture," as whether it is insured or not. "But what shall I do with my furniture?" - Thoreau, Walden

Life happens. Instead of hiking a few hundred miles and cranking out Substack content and Zines, my wife and I have been dealing with a sour-soup of death in the family, an unrelated set of hospitalizations and most pressingly, moving a last family elder into assisted living from an ancestral homestead. Challenges every Gen-X parent/child is facing now, or soon.

We’re a resourceful and competent and love-endowed family. “Compassion without delay” meant relocating for a few months to manage households, real estate transactions and legal documents. My wife and I simply packed up and got on a plane without much discussion. It’s family. Our lives compressed to carry-ons for a few months.

Going through, as Thoreau called it, a knothole, is always a transformative experience, where the scales and detritus and “furniture” gets stripped away. I have my laptop and phone, and a week’s worth of continuously-in-laundry clothes, and some toiletries. It’s hardly privation, but it is focussing in a way a work-trip isn’t.

Learnings?

• Practice is a Piggy Bank. Whether it’s prayer, yoga or meditation, I’ve made a lot of deposits in the practice bank over the last 5 years, hours sitting “for no reason.” This knothole summer finding the space, time, or quiet to really sit has been hard. And that’s OK. There are hills to walk, flow-states to chase, manual labor to be done. And for a while, this can be practice enough. This is a big deal learning for someone as neurospicy and routine-dependent as me.

• Packing light is liberating. I’ve never been an over-packer, but simply culling down to survival clothing and one backpack full of objects has been pleasant. When you’ve only packed a half dozen shirts and one pair of pants, and when your only dopamine hits come from the laptop and iPhone, the narrowed choices are freeing. This is part of why I love Zen practice so much: it gets rid of all the BS we tell ourselves “we need.”

• Yet Being Virtual is hard. It’s never been easier to live an entire nomadic life on-screen: reading or writing, listening to or making music, watching or making art. It’s all “doable.” And yet, I’ve personally become much more physical in the last 5 years. Whether it’s Zines or gardening, I work with my hands as much as my brain. That’s really hard to let go of, no matter how cool the tools are.

But perhaps the biggest learning of all has been a simple one: being the center.

We Are the Centre of the Widening Gyre

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
- Yeats, The Second Coming

My friend Ben Hunt wrote a banger a few years ago — “The Widening Gyre” — about the ravine — the chaos and confusion — we now find ourselves in as a people, as a country, as a global economy, as a culture. And he appropriately draws Apocalypse from the poem, submitting that

“We are the falcon, and the falconer is … God, if you’re religious, the Old Songs of reason and empathy and reciprocity if (like me and like Yeats) you’re not… In the widening gyre, we are deafened by Big Media and its New Songs of schadenfreude and I-got-mine-Jack, unable to hear the precepts of our better natures or the lessons of the past. … The widening gyre is a profound social equilibrium where bad people and bad ideas drive good people and good ideas out of circulation.”

While I agree with the core metaphor, I don’t think my role is to be the falcon, caught in the wind, struggling to see the Center-that-cannot-hold. No, my role is to be, or to try and be, the holding-Center. Stillness in chaos. Because while I can’t solve everything for those I love, I can be insoluble - incapable of being dissolved.

And bluntly, constant reader, that’s probably your actual job. If you have a title that includes a word like “coach” or “advisor” or “planner,” your role is to be that Center for your clients.

At a very real, but also very Woo perspective, that-we-are-center is axiomatically true. From the solipsistic black box of our skulls, we re-open our eyes each morning — each and every human on this planet — and discover the world anew. Generally, it bears a lot in common with last night. Our awareness, sense impressions, our sense of self all return quickly on waking. The world creates itself around us.

If we can recapture that beginner’s-mind morning-feeling, we know that at some level, we are the center of our own world. There is no internet. There are no preferences or desires. There is no widening gyre. There is simply miraculous awareness. There is stillness, which is, conveniently, the best seat in the house for observing, and managing, the storm.

This is what you do, as an advisor, or as a coach, like a therapist or spouse or friend. When the world is all spun up in a maelstrom: you’re the one who sits in the middle and anchors reality. You’re your clients “money person.”

There are Advisors, and “Advisors”

I got to really feel this firsthand over the last few months. Because I have the career I’ve had, when it comes to money, I get tapped by friends and family for at least my opinions, if not my recommendations.

So, I took a look when asked, and unfortunately I have now witnessed the insanity of a life-long “Wirehouse Frankenfolio” first hand. There’s no malfeasance, honestly. It’s the business. This business has changed a lot in 70 years or so. So embedded gains and inattention have left a slime-trail of “state of the art” products from decades gone by, all lumped together in hundreds of pages of statements. Variable Annuities (with all those juicy extra boxes checked), A- and C-share active mutual funds from decades-long underperformers. “Managed Accounts” with enormous-yet-hard-to-find annual fees. I suspect there are hundreds of thousands of elderly folks similarly “trapped” in such relationships.

When I first started wading through, my initial thought was just to “do a little housekeeping,” but honestly, there’s no point in trying to “fix” a lifetime of relationships while transitioning to elder-care and estate-planning. The industry number is “70%” — that’s the percent of clients that leave their advisor after a death or other major life transition.

I deeply, deeply understand why now. Because as soon as I felt the winds of the widening gyre bashing me around, as soon as I started feeling a bit upset, I paused and realized:

I don’t have to do this. I have a “money person.” I have a great advisor.

They get to be the Centre for us now.

That’s the business I see great advisors building. I may not have to talk to my “money person” on the phone very often. (I’ve learned a few things.) But at the precise moment I recognized the wind gusts, I had him on the phone. Calm. Empathetic.

Centered.

P.S. - Advisors: if you’re not doing a regular “sanity check” on your senior clients combined (including held away) assets, to ensure that every single line item has a reason for existing, you’re going to lose that family. And if you let a C-share sit on the books paying you a trail for a decade, or slipped a few A-share mutual funds in the last rebalancing, you deserve to.