It happened again. The market crashed. The bears are going wild, the sky is falling, blood is in the streets, it's the end times. Hmm... reminds me of Ghostbusters.

Dr. Raymond Stantz : Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!

Dr. Egon Spengler : Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes...

Winston Zeddemore : The dead rising from the grave!

Dr. Peter Venkman : Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... MASS HYSTERIA!

Again.

We've been here before and we likely will be here again. I know many are worried and panicking. Even if you are overexposed—and I hope you aren't; always remember to never invest more than you can afford to lose—rest assured that things probably will bounce back eventually.

Until then, a lot can be said for stepping back, closing the laptop, turning off the smartphone, and just taking a break. A haiku:

the sky is falling
and the markets are all red
time to take a walk

I don't normally follow the 5/7/5 count. It makes the poem far too long, I think. But in this case it just kind of came out that way.

I started to write a little bit on meditation, but that started to turn into its own thing, so I will post it later. I wrote it longhand at any rate, so I have to type it up later.

Meditation and haiku have a lot in common. Haiku are at their basic level poems of observation. You observe what is happening around you and you write it down. The best haiku aren't mucked up with opinions or interpretations about what was observed, they are simply directly what was observed. Let us recall Bashō's famous haiku about the frog.

古池や蛙飛びこむ水の音
furuike ya kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto

an old pond...
a frog leaps
plop!

There is a lot of imagination there. For instance, the Japanese doesn't say if it's a plop from a small frog or a splash from a larger frog or plops and splashes from many frogs, it just says "sound of water". But that doesn't matter. What matters, and the reason this has become pretty much the single most famous haiku in the world, is that this is such a perfect example of direct observation.

Meditation is about not thinking, not talking to yourself or listening to the voice in your head, it is about experiencing the world directly without the filter of the mind, and haiku is exactly the same.

But I digress. To go back to what I was saying before, don't worry too much about the red market right now. It will get better. Instead now is a great time to go take a walk. Go fart around, as Kurt Vonnegut would have said. (and if you do so, bring a notecard with you and write down a haiku while you're out there)

David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku.

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