Arthur Ashe is a name in tennis that many have forgotten but growing up he was the idol of a couple of my coaches. Maybe it was the way he broke barriers in what was once an uppity sport or maybe it was the way he glided on the court, who knows?
I had to look this up but he remains the only black man to have won the singles title at Wimbledon, the US Open, and the Australian Open. Center Court of the US Open is also named after him.
Ok, so what does this have to do with the word of the week, equanimity? Well, these days, Arthur Ashe is more well known for having passed away from AIDS.
He was one of the biggest and most public celebrities in the early days of the AIDS epidemic and after tasting the sweetest highs, he experienced the lowest lows. When asked by reporters about his AIDS diagnosis he said:
"If I were to say, 'God, why me?' about the bad things, then I should have said, 'God, why me?' about the good things that happened in my life."
When I was feeling down after narrowly losing in the finals of an interschool tennis tournament, my coach said the above quote to me and it introduced the concept of equanimity to me back when I was 16.
He was right. My run could easily have ended in the quarter-finals or semi-finals but I got a couple of lucky breaks and that led me to the finals. I was feeling down about my unlucky breaks in the final but never gave much thought about how luck played a part in me even getting to that point.
If there is a quote that has kept my life in balance, this is it.
A small digression on AIDS
On the topic of AIDS, while we wait for a cure, I believe there is too much focus on how someone got infected with the virus and along with it, comes a moral judgement from society.
Society makes needle sharers or those who have unprotected sex feel like they deserve it and then shuns them. I think that's terrible and that how one gets the HIV virus is irrelevant except for prevention and contact tracing purposes.
Crypto Trading
Is there any practical benefit to equanimity in our daily lives or is this one of those airy-fairy concepts that's not practical at all?
Calmness and composure are also good traits to have in trading and especially crypto. The roughly 50% drop in crypto prices this past week was stomach churning to say the least, but we have to put that in perspective of the 2000% run that Bitcoin has been on.
Looking at my own portfolio, I've come to be equanimous about these sort of drops as the price I pay for the outsized gains in crypto compared to other asset classes.
This is my entry for the pob-wotw organize by 
@calumam/pob-word-of-the-week-equanimity-007