POSTED: January 1, 2025
A few nights ago, I had a call from my buddy Jim. He was ranting on about moving to cash. Apparently if you have any investments this is something you do when you think the investment world is at a turning point. While it may affect me if the investment world is at a turning point, it is not something I can really do anything about as all my investment funds are tied up in perishable foods for the week in my pantry.
But for him, this is a big deal. Like me, he is seventy, and while he has travelled a different path we have both seen ups and downs in the world, whether armed conflict, recessions, political coups and regime change and of course a major pandemic and the erosion of the atmosphere. But his income is derived from the investments he has made, not from a pension or government assistance or doing any work for an income, so there is some pressure to not get it wrong. So while he was chattering on about leading indicators, fundamentals, break up values and the like I was able to translate this to mean he was anticipating THE KNOCK ON THE DOOR.
Because we go back so far as friends, I think this term originated with the risk, while sitting in one of our bedrooms, smoking, or looking at magazines we should not have had, or drinking something pilfered from one our parents alcohol cabinets, that there would be the knock on the door from a parent.
For us, the term was just reduced to The Knock, but the definition remained the same – a term for anticipating that somewhat foreseen event, with unknown timing that would change the direction of future events. Of course, the term has literal and very negative applications for fallen military and police personnel, but there are good examples as well. Certainly, every woman I have known who is in her third trimester of pregnancy has a bag packed and by the door ready for the quick trip to the hospital for the big event.
But most often the unknown timing of whatever the event is, poses a problem. Friends who are very elderly know what is to come, and usually make a lot of preparations ahead as they don’t know when that knock on the door will come but that it is inevitable, and with the passage of time its inevitability becomes more certain.
Like many things in life, its all about the preparation. If the knock is a power failure for example its best to have some non- perishable foods put aside to get you through several days and some cash as your credit cards wont work.
And yes, this heavily relates to the Jahori Window from the work of the psychologists Luft & Ingham in the 1950s and the heavy use of the terms known knowns, unknown knowns and unknown unknowns at Nasa, that Rumsfeld repeated in his speech to the U.S. Department of Defense when trying to justify an attack to find weapons of mass destruction. A knock on the door is foreseeable (a known unknown) in some cases, like living in a hurricane zone in hurricane season, the only variable is when it might occur, in contrast to an uncharted meteorite which is an unknown unknown.
This conversation, like many with my buddy Jim involved considerable time, and with me in Malta and him in Toronto occur at strange hours of the day to be consuming a fair bit of wine so sometimes the wine is consumed at one end of the line and coffee or tea at the other. This one involved wine on both ends so the discussion of known knowns and unknown knowns regarding a knock on the door takes on a special dimension when wine is involved.
At our age we are both grappling with the meaning of everything and how it fits in the world – an ever-changing world. In this case our big epiphany (I expect self evident to anyone else) was that while it is important to be prepared as much as possible for various things that might be a knock on the door, it is equally important to recognize that we can not anticipate some of those things – a negative medical diagnosis for example – so we need to very much live in the moment. Yes, make plans for the future and yes be organized for those predictable risks that we can foresee, but enjoy the moment, and the people we are with.
We have a whole fresh start on the year. I am going to make 2025 a memorable one, and hope you do as well.
Django