“It May Be Or It May Not Be”
I find myself standing outside a bus filled with Grade 8 students bound for Camp Wononkita or something like that. I don’t really know where that is, having missed the planning meeting for it. I had good intentions of being there, however, it was scheduled on my calendar half an hour after it started. Maybe that means I’m too busy, I dunno.
It was cold standing there and I was definitely flashing back. It was about 36 years ago when I stood in the same spot waiting for a bus to take me on a Grade 8 field trip to Niagara Falls. Standing there I couldn’t get that reflection out of my mind. Have the years really gone by so quickly? Do I really have some progeny on that bus when it seems like yesterday I was getting on? Or am I really getting old or does it just feel that way? I dunno.
Fast forward to the same afternoon. I’ve stopped everything to attend a funeral of a fine gentleman who was a friend of mine and a best friend of my father. I’m not good at funerals. I’m always putting myself in the shoes of the bereaved and I must admit I don’t want to go there. My throat always grows heavy, my eyes always water. This fine man had lived a very long and full life. Sitting there realizing he was gone was another reminder to live life to the fullest. Grab the brass ring every chance you get.
When I was a kid the adults around me always talked about how “time flies”. I remember always thinking how that didn’t seem to make much sense to me. Time for me as a child moved at glacial speed, especially when I had to work on the farm. However, as I moved through high school, university, got married, got divorced and moved onto grad school, the whole world changed. Time did seem to fly and more importantly, time became more important.
It became more important because I wanted a family and I ran a business and I wanted everything to be successful. It was and is and continues to be. However, what I’ve learned is there is no substitution for excellence in this life. That means you must work hard all the time because, simply put, “time flies”.
What’s that mean? It means life moves fast but after that I really don’t know what it means. I have a saying and it pertains to almost everything I do. When presented with a situation or a problem, I often preface my thoughts with “it may or may not be.” That comes from a lifetime of achieving many different things both at an academic and professional levels, but it also comes from the hardscrabble school of getting it wrong. As I’ve grown older there are not a lot of absolutes. Yes, E=MC2, but after that questioning the obvious has a tendency to make life more real.
Let me give you the quintessential example in my life. In my other life as an agricultural economist increasingly I’m being asked to do commodity forecasting. However, I’m not a practitioner of the futures market. In other words I don’t actually buy and sell futures contracts within the grain market and I don’t take other people’s money to do the same. However, I’m continually asked to speak about this because I believe I talk about the markets in an interesting and forward looking way which everybody can understand. The litmus test is to keep getting asked back.
The number one question in almost any speaking engagement concerning these markets is “Phil, what do you think is going to happen with these prices?” My answer is always “I don’t know and in fact nobody knows where prices will go.” However, everything in my subconscious is screaming out, give them your best guess with authority. However, after thinking about that on more than one occasion I’ve thought that may be a good thing to do and it may not be. At the end of the day, “the may not be” forces have won out. Ditto for the rest of my life.
That little ditty has been tough for me. I was raised in a world of absolutes. However, I’ve traveled the world only to see that everybody does not see the world as I do. After struggling with that for the better part of my life, I thought what I may think is right at first glance may not necessarily be the case. That realization has been liberating to say the least.