So, apparently the price of crude oil didn’t go to $5 per barrel, what did was the futures price of crude oil for May 2020—and about an hour after I finished writing, I think the price went all the way down to -$35 per barrel. Yes, negative. There is too much oil and not enough places to store it because usage is so low worldwide that people may be paid to take it—if I understand it correctly.
I believe that last point may be the most important: “If I understand it correctly.” This world has so many moving parts and so many avenues of complexity that little old me may pretend as if he knows what’s going on, but I really don’t. I know very little if anything about commodity futures, let alone oil futures. Apparently there are multiple types of crude oil. How does it get sold? Where does it get sold? How does it get transported? Who ships it? Who receives it? How is it stored? What environmental regulations are there for storing it? Does that vary state to state and country to country? How long can it be stored without going bad? Does is it even go bad?
These are just a handful of questions, and I’m sure even many of those answers are multifaceted, leading down an exponential web of knowledge and likely confusion. And that’s just for one thing! While many things have slowed down for us in quarantine, some things have sped up, and yet we may only learn at the same pace. How many layers are there to clinical trials, drug interactions, economic decisions, political decisions, protests, currency policies, food logistics, restaurant dynamics, and on and on and on.
Part of this complexity drives me crazy. I want to control things, I want to predict things, I want to know things. And yet I can’t. Goodness I have tried. I struggle even to know what a very close friend of mine is thinking, how am I supposed to comprehend all of the intricacies of how food goes from seed to table. I think trying to understand all of this has led me to tremendous anxiety.
So sometimes I pause. I look at it and go, “I don’t know…and I don’t need to know.” My body relaxes. Do I need to know how all of this operates? No. Can I know how it all operates? In my dreams, yes, in reality, 99.9% sure no (why not 100%? Because I don’t like to be 100% on things).
When I let myself not have to know how these things are working, not have to control what’s happening in the world, not have to make certain people do certain things, I feel so much more relaxed. I can feel my attention drift back to the present, instead of being stuck at a distance. I can feel my shoulders relax, instead of reaching for the sky. I can feel myself being here, with me.
