What the things I kept watching every day taught me

Before I knew it, my senior colleague was doing the same thing every morning.
In the slightly dusty space before the doors opened for the workday.
My senior would check the stock prices and copy the numbers onto graph paper.
Even though you could just open a computer and type the numbers in to see them,
that person would take the numbers out one by one every day and fill in the squares.
Then, they would draw a short line from the previous day's number to the current day's.
It looked like a ritual.

In the early Heisei era, securities companies were already becoming digitized.
If you opened a computer screen and typed on the keyboard,
stock prices would appear instantly, and you could even see charts.
That is why I thought my senior's method was "old-fashioned."
At the time, I didn't understand the point of going to all that trouble.

One day, I asked why they wrote them down.
My senior replied without hesitation.

"There are no shortcuts to knowing things."

When I heard those words, I wasn't convinced.

Stock prices are, after all, just "numbers."
I thought it was enough to just look at the neatly displayed charts.
So, I forgot about the ritual for a while.

Ten years later, I had left the securities company, but
my work was still close to the world of finance.
I wrote books on stock investment and created content for financial institutions.
I think I spent more time learning numbers and theories than when I was at the securities company.
I felt I had learned everything I could from books and data.

However, the more I knew, the more a nagging feeling persisted somewhere.
Even though I thought I understood, I wanted to say, "That's not it."
The feeling that "something is missing" remained with me forever.

Around that time, I read a novel in which a character copied stock prices onto graph paper.
"Oh, I know this."
The moment I read that passage, the ritual from ten years ago came to mind.

Not numbers moving on a screen, but a hand moving a pen across graph paper.
Even with the convenience of digital technology, they chose to move their hand.
That seemingly wasteful task overlapped with my senior from ten years ago.

After that, I started investing with my own money.
There were stocks that went up, and there were stocks that, despite having no major problems with their performance,
continued to slide down for over a month.

You can't see the sense of unease by just looking at it for one day.
If you keep watching, a certain morning will come.
A morning when you feel, "Something is different today."

At that moment, the ritual came to my mind.

Every time I encountered price movements that couldn't be explained by the news,
I finally began to understand the reason why my senior wrote down the numbers every day,
not in words, but with my body.

Back then, I thought
what my senior was writing on the graph paper was stock prices.

I don't think so now.

What my senior was building up every morning
was not numbers, but time.
And even now, when morning comes, I quietly open my screen.
I feel like I can see the hand of my senior, who used to draw those lines one by one on that graph paper, on the other side of the screen.