Category Archives: Self-Growth

Planning your week based on your higher values

Homemaking, Homeschooling, Parenting, Self-Growth

I’ve been thinking about different aspects of time and life management lately, precipitated by a discussion with a man who is starting his own business, in addition to a full time supervisory position at work.  I asked him about how he’s finding time to start a new business when he comes home exhausted after a long day,  and he pointed to the bulletin board in his office that was separated into four equal quarters.  He was about to explain when I nodded and told him I understood.

I was really grateful for this reminder of a principle that is so important but I’ve let it slide out of my life.  That’s the principle of organizing your life around what is known as the four quadrants.  (This is some of Steven Covey’s teaching, who is one of the two most insightful and far reaching authors I have read.)  I thought this was too complicated for a blog post but I briefly explained it to dd17 who has already started implementing it and has been finding it very helpful.

In short, every activity in life can be categorized in one of four quadrants.  The first quadrant is for things that are urgent and important.  The second quadrant is for things that are important and not urgent.  The third quadrant is for things that are urgent and not important. And the fourth quadrant is for things that are not urgent and not important.

You have no choice but to spend time in Quadrant 1 (Q1 from now on).  These are things that can’t be ignored, serious issues that leave you no choice but to deal with them.  Crisis falls into this quadrant.

The second quadrant is super powerful but the most neglected.  The more time you spend here, the less time you need to spend in Q1.  This is the quadrant of planning, reflection, spiritual growth, personal renewal – eating well, exercise, meditating.  The kind of things you never manage to find time to do because you’re too busy and one day you’ll get around to it.

The third and fourth quadrant are time wasters.  Q3 is filled with things that seem important because they’re so urgent and that’s why it takes up so much of our time.  Phones ringing, people knocking at the door or insisting they need something from us leave us feeling that this is a really important thing to do right now.  But they aren’t.

Q4 is non important, non urgent activities – time wasting activities that people overuse with the stated purpose being to relax from their stressful lives.  If it’s a meaningful relaxing activity that leaves you feeling recharged, it goes in Q2.  If it’s mind numbing and excessive, you’re looking at Q4.

So the first thing you need to do is assess what roles you play in your life, what activities they involve, and determine where each of these items are on the quadrants. The first two quadrants are where you want to spend most of your time but most people are spending the majority of their time in Q1 and Q3, the urgency quadrants.  We live in an urgency culture.  We can get addicted to the feeling or urgency because it makes us feel important to be so busy.  The problem is that urgency and importance aren’t the same, so all of this activity can leave a person feeling empty.

The goal is to move towards spending more time in Q2 – this is where quality of life comes from.  Where does the time to do that come from?  Q3 and Q4, the quadrants that will suck out all your life energy and leave you with nothing to show for it.  The more time you spend in Q2, the smaller the number of burning items in Q1 will become.  The man I mentioned at the beginning of the post told me when he first took this job, everything was urgent, rush, rush, rush.  After a month of putting practices based on these principles into place, things were running in a much calmer way.

Categorizing your activities is individual – an activity that one person experiences in one way can be experienced totally differently by someone else.

I used some of my resting time the day after my accident to do some quadrant planning.  I’d been thinking about it since last week and was planning to find a chunk of time to do some uninterrupted thinking so I took my opportunity when it presented itself!  After some reflection and writing, I took out my planner and scheduled in the Q1 and Q2 activities for the week.  This is the idea behind something I wrote about a long time ago, putting in the big rocks first.  (You’ll have to look it up if you’re interested.  :))

After you write down your important quality of life type activities for the week, then you schedule everything else around that.  You can spend your days doing little things that need to be done all day long, and get to the end of a day feeling as if you have nothing to show for your efforts.  When you prioritize your activities and execute around them, you can get lots of the smaller things done in between the big things and at the end of the day feel a sense of satisfaction that you’ve done things that really mattered to you.

Though I’ve just started doing this again, it’s been really good.  Even when things happen to throw off my time schedule that would have previously left me extremely frustrated, I still had a clear idea of what was my priority for the day and that kept me focused even when everything else about my day changed.  I made time for some deep thinking, time to write out some of my values and priorities, time to spend with my mom, time to speak to a relative in the US who I rarely talk to (great aunt).  I got all my homeschooling paperwork written up.  I went through 2000 digital photos on my camera and chose out about 10% to print out; I haven’t printed out photos in over two years though our family enjoys being able to look at albums to remember our experiences.  Now I can delete everything from my camera.  (Getting rid of clutter is a Q2 activity.)

My house wasn’t clean at the end of the day, since physically I’m more limited than usual right now.  I like when things look neat, but I was still able to feel a sense of accomplishment because the things that really mattered to me (and these will be different for each person) things it’s so easy to be too busy for – were done.

This is an incredibly powerful way to live life if done consistently.  I hope I haven’t made it seem to obvious in my effort to simplify a lot of material.  Please let me know if this sounds helpful to you!

Avivah

Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional

Self-Growth

Today I began reading a book that I’m really enjoying – ‘Get Off Your “But”: How to end self-sabotage and stand up for yourself’.  The author is Sean Stephenson, born with a rare bone disorder.  When he was born, most of his bones were broken because his bones were so brittle they couldn’t withstand the stresses of being born.  It’s hard for me to even comprehend that – his parents weren’t allowed to hold him because the force of that could break more bones.  Can you imagine?  This disorder led to many, many broken bones over the years – he said he and his parents stopped counting at 200 – things that we could do without thinking would break his bones.  It also affected his growth and ability to walk – his adult height is 3 feet and he is in a wheelchair, since his bones aren’t able to support him standing up and walking.

In this book he shares about a difficult situation he experienced at the age of 10, and when he was screaming in pain and asking his mother why he had to go through all of this suffering, her response was very striking.  So much so that I copied it down for myself and want to share it with you as well since it really resonated with me.  What she told him was, “Pain is inevitable.  Eventually, it touches us all.  Suffering, however, is optional.”

This encapsulated my thoughts on the subject of living through difficult times in such a pithy way!  It also clarified a point that I’ve been trying to keep clear for myself, that of acknowledging one’s pain to oneself, not denying it but also not getting lost in it.  It’s very easy to turn off and pretend that everything is fine.  I was talking to a friend about this topic and she said she had recently read a book about codependence, and it said that’s what codependents do.  It’s also very easy to talk a good game and say how everything is fine.

But in my opinion, it’s much harder to feel your pain and at the same time, make the choice that you’re not going to wallow in it or allow it to run your life.  Feeling your pain is, well, painful!  And we try to avoid experiencing unpleasant feelings.  But it’s really important to be able to touch the vulnerable and tender parts of ourselves.  This past week I’ve been consciously working on giving my kids space to feel their sadness, not rushing to reassure them when they express some distress.  Here’s the example that made me realize I needed to be more in touch with this.  Last week my ds14 was supposed to pick up ds5 from kindergarten, and forgot.  When he realized this, he felt really badly and said, “Oh my gosh, I forget everything!”

Now, this son has been an unbelievable help in the last month.  He’s taken over all the laundry, he and dd16 cleaned the house for Pesach together and kept everything running throughout me being gone at hospitals and then being sick; he’s changed his morning schedule so that he can take ds5 to school every day, and he helps out in many other ways.  I responded, “You’ve been an amazing help in this last month and I really appreciate all that you’ve been doing.  We all forget things sometimes, it’s okay.”  I actually thought that was a good response; I didn’t express annoyance or frustration that he forgot something important.  But when I shared this with an advisor, she pointed out to me that I wasn’t giving him a space to be sad.  This was extremely astute of her to pick up on.  What I should have said was, “I see you feel really badly about forgetting to pick up ds – that must be a horrible feeling.”  And let him say what he wanted to say before going on with what I said, rather than smoothing things over without acknowledging his sadness about not doing something that he should have.

When this situation was pointed out to me I realized that I do this pretty often, thinking that I’m being encouraging or supportive.  So that’s something I’ve been working on this week.  I don’t want my kids to have to pretend that everything is okay when it’s not, and I don’t want to cut off their opportunities to express their negative feelings even though I’ve been doing it with the best of intentions.

It might sound a little strange to say that it’s a positive feeling to feel the sadness of things not being the way you want, but it’s been a good growing experience.  As small as these little changes were that I made when listening to the kids, I realized tonight that it had a positive impact on me in deepening my ability to be in touch with my own feelings.   That was a pretty nice side benefit!

So back to the quote.  Yes, we all will go through tough things in life.  And it will be painful. But that doesn’t mean we have to be miserable about it.  I met someone at the supermarket before Pesach who was picking up a huge order of meat, and I asked her why she was buying so much. She told me she would be cooking for thirty people every day of Pesach.  I commented that it sounded hard, and she said to me, “It’s not easy but it’s sameach – happy.  And when you’re happy, then nothing is too much.”  I agreed with her, with the caveat that I shared above – that a person be honest with themselves and not just put on a superficial mask of happiness.

Today someone told me that I’m a strong person.  People often tell me that, but I’m not so sure.  Maybe, maybe not.  But what I did tell her is that I really believe that everything that happens is for the good, even when I don’t see it, and that helps me deal with a lot of what happens in my life.  So much of our suffering is in our mind, in the thoughts we think about what we go through.  I try to be aware of my thinking, since our thoughts determine our emotions, but recently I felt so snowballed that I got off keel and was thinking in a negative and besieged way.  I caught myself doing this so now I’m working on being conscious of my thoughts and actively replacing negative thinking with thoughts that are more productive.  This is where I think the idea that suffering is optional comes in.  We can’t control what happens to us, but we can choose our response.

Avivah

Dh gone for a four month trip

Self-Growth

My husband left last night for a four month trip to the US to be with dd18.

I don’t feel very cheerful about this so I’d rather just not mention it, but it’s a very very very huge deal for our family so I can’t not say anything.  I’m sad about that for many reasons – like my husband is my very best friend in the entire world and is an integral part of my life- and I could hardly say goodbye to him because I was so choked up.

On the other hand, we’re both grateful that we’re able to find a way for one of us to be there for dd18.  When I was telling someone in the States I was worried about the impact of me being gone for months from my family (since at that point the plan was for me to go), she gave me a really positive perspective.  She said, you’re showing your children how far you’ll go to be there for their sister when she needs you, and that will give them a confidence in knowing that no matter what you’ll always be there for them, too.   This was really good to help me shift from worrying about the possible impact of the trauma or things our children would miss with one parent being away for so long.

So this is what we’re focusing on; we don’t say that dh went to the US but that he went to be with dd18.

I really want to think that somehow we’ll be able to go there after a couple of months and we can all spend the summer together, but that’s not currently part of our reality.  A friend today said to me that we’ve gotten clear direction about who needs to be where, and when, and that as time goes on it’s likely to become obvious about the next step.  I know she’s right.  It’s just that I like to plan ahead and be organized, to minimize stress and problems by being proactive.  But in this past month, there hasn’t been one tiny thing I’ve been able to plan for, to feel like I have any control over.

I get tired of feeling so darned powerless.  Really, I do.  I also get tired of feeling humbled.  And I’m tired of not having so many things that I want.  Sorry to disillusion anyone who may have thought the gentle beatific smile of acceptance never leaves my lips and my halo stays in place when I sleep.  🙂  I would be doing a disservice to you all if you were to think that I’m always able to calmly and easily put everything unpleasant to the side, without any feelings of resentment or negativity.  I’m not.

And I don’t think you have to, or even that you should.  I try to be honest with myself about how I’m feeling, since you can’t get to a good place emotionally by pretending to yourself that everything is fine.  Sometimes I can find perspective easily and maintain it even when it’s hard but generally this is something I consistently actively work on.  Sometimes I need to sit with my unhappiness and allow myself to be unhappy without telling myself all the reasons I should be happy or shaming myself for not having a better attitude.

And it may not be impressive or inspiring, but it’s real and so it has to be just as okay as all the warm and fuzzy stuff.

Avivah

Learning to accept what is and find happiness in every situation

Homemaking, Self-Growth

When I got out of the hospital with Yirmiyahu on Sunday afternoon, my intention was to spend every bit of time together with our family possible before the upcoming four month separation.  (I was going to go to the US for an extended period but after Yirmiyahu’s hospitalization we changed plans, and my husband will be leaving right after Pesach to be with dd18.)  But man plans and G-d laughs.

We had a lovely seder, though I really felt dd18’s absence. The next day I began to have difficulty breathing. By the evening it was very, very hard to breathe and my husband mentioned that he was also starting to have trouble breathing. That was the beginning of the worst virus I’ve ever experienced in my life – every possible symptom you could have except ear pain, I had.  Coughing, runny nose, stuffed up nose, chills, feverish, shaking, nausea, vomiting, pain in every part of my body, inability to eat, gastrointestinal upset and lungs that feel coated with phlegm.  The first two days in bed I wasn’t aware of much that was going on around me; I had this weird feeling of seeing four dimensions of my mind opening at one time while I was tossing and turning (I know, it’s very weird and I don’t even know that that means but that’s what I felt).  I woke up with my entire body sweating late Friday afternoon – did you know that your legs can sweat?:) – with my clothes and blanket damp, and it was like something broke – and was able to get up and light Shabbos candles.

I had to go right back to bed but was picturing being better by the next day.  However, that was much too optimistic.   (Dh went to the doctor and was told that it’s a virus and there’s nothing to do but wait it out.  Of course all my home remedies are packed away for Pesach.)  Right now it’s the fourth day and for the first time I can sit up and focus somewhat.  I’m still very weak and it looks like I’ll be in bed for at least another day.  I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to be up at least somewhat for the last day of Pesach.  Dh has also been really sick but not as bad as me, so we’ve been bonding together by being sick together.  🙂

Dh was able to read when he was sick and was sharing with me some things he read.  One article was about what to look for in a marriage partner. The article stated that you should look for a compatible life direction and life philosophy. He said that he thinks that what’s most important is a spouse who can roll with life’s punches and understand that things won’t always go the way you want, the way you plan, the way you expect.

I agreed, though I do think you have to start with the commonality of a shared life vision.  You learn to deal with the twists and turns of life by going through them and you can’t really know how you’re going to handle a situation until you’re in the situation.

I’ve said this before: every single person is going to go through very difficult things in their lives.  You can be as proactive as you can to take care of your health and invest in your marriage and your family and be financially responsible and interact with everyone in a respectful way – and you can avoid some problems, but there’s no way to avoid all of them.  Every single person was put here in this world with a unique mission, and part of your mission is to be tested in some significant way to bring out something in you that easy times can’t bring out.

But that’s really an academic matter until you face it.

It’s natural to want to kick and scream ‘Unfair!’ when something  bad happens to us.  But at a certain point we have to move past that and find acceptance.  When we get stuck insisting that life should be different, we make things so much harder for ourselves.

I want to share with you something very powerful that I love so much that I carried with me in my wallet for a long time.  (Hmm, what happened to this when I moved?)  I often read this to myself when I felt frustrated about something that wasn’t going my way in the course of the day and it always helped recenter me.  It’s from the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, a book that focuses on practical spirituality; a good friend of ours who was a mashgiach ruchani in a major yeshiva in Israel told my husband that he was amazed how totally in line with Torah the principles of this book are.

“And acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing or situation — some fact of my life — unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment.

Nothing, absolutely nothing happens in God’s world by mistake. Until I could accept my alcoholism (I substitute whatever word is appropriate for my situation), I could not stay sober; unless I accept life completely on life’s terms, I cannot be happy. I need to concentrate not so much on what needs to be changed in the world as on what needs to be changed in me and in my attitudes.”

Isn’t that beautiful?  I hope you find it as helpful as I have!

Avivah

“Mommy, when will I die?”

Healthy Living, Parenting, Self-Growth

Yesterday I was sitting next to ds5 on the bus on our way home from our shopping trip, when he suddenly asked me: “Mommy, when will I die?”

I looked at him and said, “When you were born, Hashem (God) gave you a neshama (soul) that has a special job.  You’re going to be alive as long as your neshama has a job to do, and hopefully that will be for a very long time.”

He was satisfied with that answer and didn’t ask anything else.  But that jolted my thoughts.

When Yirmiyahu was taken to the hospital and even more when I was told how he nearly didn’t make it, I was wracked with guilt.  I kept thinking over and over, ‘Just a few more hours, what if we hadn’t taken him then, why didn’t I take him sooner?  Why didn’t I pay more attention to my gut feeling that something was wrong?”   Over and over.  I kept thinking: ‘I have to let go of this, I did the best I could, I was far from negligent about the situation…’  But still my mind would start playing, ‘what if, what if, what if?’

Then I heard those words come out of my mouth to answer ds5 and they gave me a burst of clarity: Yirmiyahu didn’t die, not because we got him to the emergency room on time.  He made it because his soul has a purpose and he needs to be here. That means that Hashem made sure he’d get there on time.  And if it hadn’t been us taking him for medical care, He would have sent another messenger to make sure that Yirmiyahu got the medical help he needed.  Because Yirmiyahu needs to be here, not just as the light of my life, but as part of God’s plan.

I can’t tell you what a gift and relief this was, to have peace of mind and let go of this huge emotional weight on me.  I don’t know if I’ll ever  totally let go of that fear of ‘what if’ or wipe out every vestige of guilt that I didn’t do something differently.  But this reminded me that God and His plan aren’t part of the picture; they are the picture.

Avivah

Appreciating what you have before it’s gone – but when it’s gone, trust that it will be back again

Homemaking, Parenting, Self-Growth

A number of months ago, I was going to write a post about the importance of appreciating each day as it is, as imperfect as it is.  Because wherever you are today, however hard it seems, you don’t know what the next day holds.  It’s important to actively appreciate each day for all that is good, and appreciate all the bad that hasn’t happened.  Like that all your kids are in bed at night, and no one has broken an arm or had to go to the emergency room.  The day after I mentally wrote this, one of our children was taken to the emergency room, and I remember thinking how glad I was that I had focused on what I had before I didn’t have it.

You don’t want hard times to be a wake up call that force you to see in retrospect that you missed out on enjoying the days you had because you were too busy looking at what was wrong.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.  As much as I try to actively look for the good in each day, I can see so many things I didn’t appreciate.  I didn’t appreciate my baby’s wet diaper, him moving his limbs or having the strength to make sounds.  There are a lot of other things I didn’t appreciate until I didn’t have them.

At the hospital, I asked a nurse who was sighing heavily what was wrong, and she told me that things were hard.  I asked her why, and she told me that she has to get ready for Pesach/Passover and that we women have hard lives.  I said to her, “I hear what you’re saying, but right now I’d be very happy to be at home getting ready for Pesach.”  Three weeks ago Pesach preparation seemed like something significant to deal with.  Now it’s hardly a minor blip to me.  I wasn’t preaching to her or saying her reality wasn’t valid, because of course it is. I was just sharing my perspective from my vantage point right now.

Yesterday I was feeling overwhelmed about the sequence of events lately, like everything in my life was shattering all around me.  Thinking about all the things in my life that were good that I hadn’t appreciated enough made me feel even worse.  I wanted the reassurance that this was as bad as it was going to get, that I had hit rock bottom and the only place to go was up.  But if there were still good things left, I didn’t have that reassurance.

I’ve watched my life and the lives of others spiral down very quickly, frighteningly quickly.  We want to feel like we’re in control of our lives and if we do the right things, life will proceed in a predictably pleasant way.  We don’t want to think that despite our best efforts, things can shift in the blink of an eye.  But today I was comforted when remembering this fact of life is two sided: it can always be worse, but it can also always be better.  And just as things can get bad very quickly, they can also change for the better in an instant.

That thought gave me a lot of hope and perspective.

Avivah

The value of tears of sadness

miscellaneous, Parenting, Self-Growth

In his Power to Parent series, Dr. Gordon Neufeld teaches about the significance of frustration.

Frustration is an emotion you feel when something in your life isn’t working for you.  When faced with frustration, there are several ways that this can express itself.  The most healthy options are to 1) change the situation that frustrates you, or if you aren’t able to do something to change what is bothering you, to 2) accept that you can’t change the situation.  In order to accept the situation as it is, it requires feeling the futility of the situation, feeling the sadness of wanting something and not having it.  This is something that many of us find difficult because we have become defended from our emotions, meaning that we’ve hardened ourselves to a degree so as to not feel painful emotions, sadness about unmet desires being one of those painful feelings.

What happens when a person becomes emotionally defended?  Since they don’t allow themselves to feel the sadness of the situation, when faced with frustration it manifests as aggression (towards himself or others).  Dr. Neufeld teaches about how to help a person who is emotionally hardened find what he calls ‘tears of futility’; this is necessary for them to constructively deal with tough emotions and grow emotionally.  He talks a lot about how to do this, and one possibility is to carefully touch on painful situations to bring them to tears.  These tears are a sign of adaptive behavior and get something that can turn foul out of our systems where it can’t harm us.

Yesterday morning I was very anxious about Yirmiyahu being so sick, and as I started thinking about the possibility he’d need to be hospitalized began to tear up.  I don’t cry often, but this past week and a half I’ve had my share of tears.  I thought, “God, what do you want from me already?”  And suddenly it occurred to me, maybe He isn’t demanding something of me but giving me an opportunity.  Just as a loving parent may touch on painful topics in order to help a child experience his futility and grow, God is pushing me to find my tears.  Tears of futility (this can also be the feeling of sadness of futility without the tears) release tensions, help us come to peace about all that we are going through, and increase our emotional adaptability.

Fully feeling our sadness is an important and powerful step in  breaking down the internal barrier that separates us from our deeper selves, from others, and from God – so this is my impetus to embrace rather than resist the discomfort of the challenges I’m feeling right now.

It’s not fun but it’s good.

Avivah

When too much is too much…keeping yourself together

Self-Growth

Sometimes life throws a curve ball that is really hard to catch.

I’m here in the US for a medical emergency for my oldest daughter with a scheduled return to Israel after one week.  I planned to come for two weeks but those advising me in the US who were aware of what was happening medically told me that one week would probably be enough.  I had been worried about leaving my family for two weeks, but one week was very manageable.

Then this morning I was talking to someone involved with the situation, and she mentioned that I’d probably have to stay two to three months to help my daughter with her medical situation.  That timeline was so totally unexpected and I was so overwhelmed at that comment that I literally couldn’t say anything for over a full minute, and when I did I wasn’t successful at keeping my voice steady.

My mind was racing.  How in the world am I supposed to leave all my kids overseas with minimal communal support for them?  My dd16 can’t run the house on her own, it’s totally unreasonable and damaging to expect that of someone her age.  My little kids are already asking if I’m coming home tomorrow, and that was when I had been here less than 24 hours – how do I tell them that it will be months before I come home?  Skype and the telephone are wonderful tools but my kids need more than that.

What about Yirmiyahu and all his medical needs?  Next week, I have five appointments scheduled for him (physical therapy, naturopath, pediatric hematologist, pediatric allergist, kidney ultrasound) – it’s taken time to get a  handle on all of this.   And now to start all over?

And my mother. She’s supposed to have another surgery after Pesach, and I’m supposed to be the one there to help support her and translate for her.  She doesn’t make any demands on me and this is something I’m so happy I can do for her, but I can’t offer anything if I’m over five thousand miles away.

I couldn’t even think about this without getting emotional.  How do you weigh the needs of one child against the needs of everyone else?  How do you know when your presence will really make a significant difference that will justify the upheaval for everyone else, when either choice you make is a big loss for someone?

Hard, hard, hard.

Then I asked myself a different question: how could I minimize the negative impact of this experience on our family?  A possibility that came to mind was to bring everyone here for a few months. This idea wasn’t much less overwhelming than the idea of staying apart for a few months.  When a friend called a short time later and suggested it might make more sense to bring everyone here to be together during this time, I started crying and told her I can’t see how it’s possible, it’s just too much for everyone.

We’ve invested so much into getting everyone adjusted to life in Israel, and now we’re finally at the point that things are getting easier and everyone is settled in.  Israel is where we belong and where we want to be, even though life in the US would be much easier in some ways.  I have a lot of reservations about uprooting them at this point and bringing them here, not to mention the tremendous efforts that would be necessary to make it happen.  And if I’m busy with everyone else being here, would that compromise my ability to be there for dd, which is the point of being here?

Take a deep breath and stop thinking so much, you don’t have to know all the answers or see where this is going.  There’s a path and if you keep taking one step at a time and look for what G-d wants of you instead of trying to figure it out on your own, it will start to become clear what to do.  

After several hours of feeling very emotional about all of this, I’m in a pretty good head space now.  I don’t have answers or even a hint about how things will play out.  But I know there’s a bigger plan here and that everything is playing out in a way that will be most beneficial for us all.

Avivah

Connecting emotionally with Rosh Hashana prayer service

Self-Growth

I had such a nice Rosh Hashana!  What made it especially nice was that for the first time in several years, I was able to daven (pray) at shul for the entire mussaf service on the first day.  I’m not a person who does much formalized prayer – I talk to G-d throughout the day but that’s mostly it.  So you wouldn’t think that this being in shul for hours in formalized prayer would really resonate with me.

When I was younger, I found the High Holiday services long and tedious.  I frequently was looking at the clock and counting how many pages were left until the end.  I just didn’t connect with the importance and intensity of the days of Rosh Hashana.  But as you get older and your children get older, you have more and more understanding of how important this time of year is.  I used to wonder how women much older than  me could stand for so long during the prayer service, and now I what I think is that they had a deep connection to the seriousness of what Rosh Hashana is, and for them, now could they count pages of their prayerbook or think about what time they need to warm up the food for it to be ready for the lunch meal when there’s so much at stake?

This year, I gave a class on Shabbos about how to develop a mindset for Rosh Hashana.  One thing I shared in the class was that we need to approach G-d with humility that comes from the understanding that absolutely everything comes from Him and that we literally have nothing and are nothing without Him.  When we really understand at a deep emotional level that G-d is determing the fate of all mankind and particularly for me and my family for the coming year on Rosh Hashana, it totally changes the prayer experience.

I thought a lot about how everything that has happened to us in the last year was decreed a year before.  One of those was especially wonderful – the birth of our baby, which I feel was like winning the lottery.  The likelihood of having a baby with T21 at my age was only one in 250, and I hit the jackpot!  I really mean that seriously; I feel so lucky and privileged to have this baby that I don’t have the words to express it.

Another of those things was extremely difficult and painful, and last year I was blissfully ignorant of what was hanging over my head and being determined for me on Rosh Hashana.   It was a growing experience that I don’t want to go through again and I really begged G-d not to send me tests like this!  Most things fall somewhere in the middle between these two extremes.  Keeping all of this in mind made supplication for a good year very much a practical and prudent rather than theoretical thing to do.

If you’re wondering why I only mentioned one prayer service, that’s because the reality of my life didn’t allow for more than that plus the mandatory shofar blowing.  The second morning I had to really let go of my desire to stay at shul and recognize that my task at that time was to be at home and take care of the people who needed me.  It’s much harder to feel spiritual and lofty in this situation, but I kept reminding myself that I need to do what G-d puts in front of me and remember that’s what He wants me to do.

Avivah

Accessing intuition

Self-Growth

A couple of weeks ago I woke up and thought of a friend I hadn’t spoken to in several months.  Then a half thought went through my mind, ‘is she dead?’, followed by a feeling of gratitude that I had called and left a message for her several weeks ago letting her know I was thinking of her.   It was so strange to have a feeling like that, the kind of gratitude you feel when you don’t have any more time left in a relationship and can only look back on what was.  But it didn’t make any sense and kind of flashed through my mind, so I shook the feeling off as being negative and got started on my day.

An hour later a friend called, and told me that a mutual friend of ours passed away the evening before.   Before she even told me the name, I knew what she was going to say, and I immediately realized why what seemed like a bizarre thought had gone through my mind.   Sure enough, she then told me that the person I had just been thinking about an hour before had passed away.

Then yesterday I had a weird thing happen.  I was driving home from an outing with my two littlest ones, and suddenly a thought that W. Clement Stone has referred to as a reverse paranoid came into my mind  (meaning he cultivated the belief that everyone was out to do something nice for him).  So, I continued thinking, when you’re driving on a highway you aren’t dealing with anyone one-on-one so it’s hard to apply that attitude.   Then I thought, ‘maybe I’m supposed to be in a car accident this minute and I don’t even appreciate the good that is happening for me because I take it for granted’.  I took a moment to consciously focus on my appreciation that Hashem (God) was keeping me safe and protected as I drove.

Then literally two minutes later, a large truck merged very suddenly right in front of me, with a marginal amount of space between my van and him.  I eased off the gas to put some more room between us, thinking that he clearly had a lot of confidence in his spacial perception since that merge was a risky maneuver.  A minute later, it felt like the highway exploded in front of me but it wasn’t an explosion, it was that so much suddenly happened in a few seconds.  The truck in front of me must have decided he was in the wrong lane because he rapidly merged back into the lane he had just come from on the right, but as he did, he hit the car in that lane, sending her slamming into the concrete barrier.  As I saw her car headed for the barrier, he was violently swerving over two lanes of traffic (I assume in his failed attempt to avoid hitting the person who must have been in his blind spot)  and narrowly missed hitting the car on the other side.

I wasn’t sure if I should write about this, because I can’t put into words the feeling I had.  A couple of minutes later I started shaking, and it wasn’t feeling like it could have been me that made me feel like that, which is a normal feeling.  It was that less than three minutes before I had been thinking the thought I shared with you.  The ‘coincidence’ was too uncanny, the timing too remarkable, and what unnerved me was a kind of inner sense that as a result of that thought and focus of gratitude just two minutes before, somehow it shifted something that was about to happen to me.

Intuition is an incredible thing.  I don’t pretend to know how it works or the meaning of these things, and I know I may sound kind of woo-woo or corny to mention these examples, but more and more I’ve become convinced that we need to learn to access our internal wisdom.  My mother thinks that I inherited a gift her mother had, something called the ‘sixth sense’, but I don’t think so.  I think this is probably a normal thing that most people have, the whisperings of the soul maybe, but we all ignore it because we’re supposed to be rational beings and this stuff isn’t quantifiable and doesn’t make sense.

But the fact is that whether we try to access it or not, we all have intuition.  Recognizing what is intuition and what is mental clutter can be hard, and I can’t personally tell you what the difference is.  I haven’t figured it out, but it is kind of scary when I do recognize it.

Avivah