Spiritual guide to keep calm and carry on amid market volatility, bad news

How to overcome tough times: The difference between a learned man and an unlearned man, the buddha said, is not the outcome of the changing circumstance, the change will hit us all, but how he understands and accepts it. (Illustration by Suneesh K.)

Olympian wrestler Vinesh Phogat and the sedate Central Bank of Japan were both desperately trying to keep their weights down against an inching percentage gain getting the better of them.

In February, Japan had unexpectedly slipped into a recession, only to narrowly pick itself out of said ditch by March. Phogat faced challenging circumstances, confronting police violence in 2023 when she was seeking justice in the case of her alleged sexual harassment, struggling with injury and post-operative recovery, visa delays, and just about making it to the Olympics, to fight in a category under her normal weight.

Outmaneuvering the setting sluggishness, the Bank of Japan raised rates for the first time in 15 years but rattled the markets, depreciating the Yen and sending the Nikkei plunging last week. Phogat handed Japan’s undefeated Yui Susaki her first dethronement to take the silver in a stunning upset.  Immediately after, both were forced back, the sedate central bank assuring the trembling markets there would be no more hikes even as Phogat’s silver was revoked the following morning, at the weigh in. (As of August 8, the Court of Arbitration for Sports was deliberating on Vinesh Phogat's plea against her disqualification. The decision is expected to come before the end of the Olympic Games.)

A reversal of fortune can seem momentous when we are going through it, because it dominates the mindscape. When we step back, we realize it is only one of the changes we are faced with.

With galloping US unemployment and a looming recession, in a world arena of war, conflict and coup, the fall of governments and the uncertainty of anything but brutal identity politics, we face a Shakespearean landscape where, as a blinded Gloucestor says in 'King Lear' as he roams the heath: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.”

Being disheartened seems inevitable in this volatile environment. And yet, we must hedge our bets wisely and get through the tough times.

Such mercurial rises and falls, peripeteia, the sudden reversal of fortune, are the stuff of Greek tragedy. While you may not be sprinting towards an Olympic medal, you are running the race of your life in your personal and professional life—whether it’s buying your house, fortifying your retirement pot, paying off debts, following a dream, or paying for your children’s education.

You had a plan, you put in the work, and now its future is uncertain. We are this close to victory, taste it even, when we are blindsided into our defeats.

These are exactly the vicissitudes of life that Shakyamuni buddha taught when he delivered the Lokavipatti Sutta, the seminal teachings on the Eight Worldly Winds. He enumerated these pairs of oppositions as:

- Pleasure and Pain,

- Gain and Loss,

- Praise and Blame,

- Repute and Disrepute.

They occur equally to a learned man or an unlearned man, he taught. However well you’ve researched your portfolio, it’s likely there are factors beyond your control and despite your effort influencing it negatively.

The difference between a learned man and an unlearned man, the buddha said, is not the outcome of the changing circumstance, the change will hit us all, but how he understands and accepts it.

“Mendicants, an unlearned ordinary person encounters gain. They don’t reflect: ‘I’ve encountered this gain. It’s impermanent, suffering, and perishable.’ They don’t truly understand it. They encounter loss … fame … disgrace … blame … praise … pleasure … pain. They don’t reflect: ‘I’ve encountered this pain. It’s impermanent, suffering, and perishable.’ They don’t truly understand it.

So, gain and loss, fame and disgrace, blame and praise, and pleasure and pain occupy their mind. They favour gain and oppose loss. They favour fame and oppose disgrace. They favour praise and oppose blame. They favour pleasure and oppose pain. Being so full of favouring and opposing, they’re not freed from rebirth, old age, and death, from sorrow, lamentation, pain, sadness, and distress. They’re not freed from suffering, I say.” [Aṅguttaranikāya, 8.6/1/2nd]

Equanimity is built by having a wise perspective of change. How you frame the unexpected disruption is invaluable to overcoming it. A reversal of fortune can seem momentous when we are going through it, because it dominates the mindscape. When we step back, we realize it is one of the changes we are faced with, not the only one. We still eat, live, sleep, relate and work much the way we used to.

We fear that this change will be unsurmountable. In doing so, we forget that we have lived through times before this change and will survive after it has come and gone. For instance, we are so close to buying our house when the interest rate on the loan changes, the going property rate is unviable, or the government changes its tax policy for capital gains, or our investment that we had banked upon for the down payment is no longer worth as much as it used to be. We’ve had to put our plans on hold. However, we forget that there was a time when we hadn’t even come this far, when even ‘almost there’ was still a dream, and here we are on the threshold. We forget the buildup of wins in the disappointment of the immediate loss.

Investing for the long term allows us a perspective that includes some downfall and rising up again, rather than short term outlooks alone.

We also imagine that the opportunity we thought we had will not come again. Perhaps the house we wanted to buy won’t be available by the time we are ready. Perhaps Vinesh Phogat is on her last chance for an Olympic medal. While the same opportunity won’t, another will and perhaps that one will be better, more meaningful if not as dramatic. Perhaps she will make a real difference to young women aiming for Olympic gold even if she didn’t seal the deal herself. Perhaps we will find that the more affordable house doesn’t feed our ambitions and ego, but it is a nicer neighbourhood and lighter on the pocket. Perhaps one year later, you will look back on this lost opportunity from a vantage point and be glad you didn’t take it.

Think of the times in your life when you thought you couldn’t live without a specific job opportunity, an exam mark or kind of degree, that one relationship and it was denied to you. When we are teenagers we believe missing the party our parents won’t let us attend is the end of our social life and friendships, and yet, we get through it. In the moment what seems too big to overcome feels less painful in hindsight. It can, on occasion, even feel beneficial. Perhaps you think of the ‘one that got away’ with a wistful smile and realise today that you’ve become a different person as you’ve aged and that wouldn’t have worked out in the long run, and you welcome the disruptions of your youth. You have survived a lot of detours life has thrown in your path before and will again.

How to cope with rising and falling fortunes

We also fear change because we think it’s personal, it’s happening only to us and the universe or fate is out to trip up our plans. You feel this because your goals seem so important to you. Hate to break it to you, but perhaps in the larger picture, among the billions of beings on earth, perhaps your personal portfolio isn’t a target of the expansive Universe’s ire? When you look around and realise it’s happening as a result of a global concomitance of factors, to entire populaces from Japan to the US. You understand that the fates are not out to get you, but you are a cog in a giant wheel. Just as a virus in one part of China has the ability to affect someone in Minneapolis who doesn’t even know where Wuhan is on a map, a financial fluctuation in Japan can affect a stock trading in the US markets because we are all interdependent.

We may also in our fear, forget that this phase will not last. As it rose, it had crashed, and as it crashes, it will rise again. We didn’t have and then we did, and now we’ve lost it again, which means we can also gain it again. This is the nature of the markets, and this is the nature of life itself. All creation and destruction is cyclic. As one morning you are sleeping on a sidewalk, the second you are in surgery, the third you are an Olympian, and the next you are stripped of your medal, the fifth you announce your retirement and realise you are a world icon for women, and the sixth you are influencing sports policy, and by the fiftieth you become an unknown senior citizen on your morning walk again.

Investing for the long term allows us a perspective that includes some downfall and rising up again, rather than short term outlooks alone. The long term gives us an abundance of time in which to allow markets to correct themselves and make plain the cyclical nature of life and loss and gain.

This is an understanding of impermanence and interdependence, that things change, people change, our own desires wants and priorities re-align constantly, factors that we rely on align or deny us our goals, that we are not alone in our struggles, we are not isolated and picked on by the fates, and we adapt to the circumstances in front of us keeping the long term in mind.

To be rigid in our emotional states is to break when we should bend. And to deny ourselves hope, faith, belief, and the thrill of seeing outcomes we have not thought of and accepting the wider network of existence that we are a part of, influence and are influenced by. Detachment from fixed outcomes, anticipation of squalls, seeking companionship, guidance, help when we need it, and some patience for the endless rise and fall of the waves in the ocean allows us to steer our small boats surely and deftly to land.