OPTIONALITY

I used to trade options based on stocks. These were known variously as call options and put options. You might be familiar with employee stock options: the employer gives employees the right to buy company shares at a fixed (usually discounted) price. It gives people ownership. But I digress.

There is inherent optionality in life. Options typically have a fixed expiry date. So does life. It typically has what is known as the strike price, this is the price from which the value of the option is calculated against. We could regard this as where we are at at birth for example. In a call option, the higher the value of the stock, the higher the value of the option. This is typically intrinsic value + time value. So during your lifetime, you have a fixed period of time to create value. You could measure this in $ earned in a lifetime for example.

On a balance sheet, you need to depreciate assets eg. computers. We all know that a computer is not going to last forever. In fact, even if it works fine, it will be incompatible with a lot of new software etc. in only a year's time. So suffice it to say that things don't last forever. Thus they ALL have optionality: a fixed period of time to be of value or not.

So when we expire, will we expire worthless? Or will we expire with a lot of intrinsic value......for those puzzled by this, I'll try and expand upon this concept in due course.

Thanks for reading.

JONAH & THE WHALE, AND GETTING THE MONKEY OFF YOUR BACK

For the last 9 years I've had a general sense of unease about something I believed I should devote my time to seeing come to pass. It involves putting on an event in a country where such a thing would be difficult to pull off. In the last 5 years in fits and starts I have kept the possibility alive, but never put it all on the line to get it done.

In the meantime I have variously spent my time:

1) Doing nothing
2) Doing things to distract myself from doing THE thing

So like Jonah, I've been running away. But the sense that this could be my "Signs" moment-- you know from the movie: the little girl who places glasses of water all around the house, the brother who has wasted his prodigious baseball batting skills; only to discover that the aliens threatening earth can be destroyed by water--this could be the moment, the task, the ONE THING, that I was asked to do by God, and I have found all manner of ways to avoid actually doing it. Tried to hand it off to others....

But it won't go away, I can't stop thinking about it, and it's possible I'm sitting in the belly of the whale and don't even know it.

I can't shake this perennial burden that I need to stop thinking of other things to occupy my time, and focus on getting this thing done. Mostly from the point of view that I need to be obedient to God, but really just to seek the peace, and the removal of the burden that I currently have.

SO......are you doing what you are supposed to do....or are you finding every reason not to do it. 9 years on. Mine is still here, and its getting unbearable.