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I’m a little late
starting this column this month (sorry Bob and Mina!) because I was anticipating
a weekend visit with my friend S, and I knew that by the time she departed, I
would have ideas to share that I hadn’t entertained before. (Disclaimer
here: I told S that I wanted her help in planning this screed, and I write it
now with her permission and input. Though of course all nonsense is my own
– most truly.) (home)
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I met S, oh, six or seven years ago now, at High
Holy Day services. She and her partner were up from San Francisco, where
they live. I think it was in the break after Yom Kippur morning services
that S’s partner corralled me in a friendly way, introduced me to S, and said,
“S really wants to talk with you.” I sat down with them, a bit delirious
from a long and intense morning, and S said to me, “I want to talk with you
about the meaning of life.”
That perked me right up. I like that
topic. But I didn’t have any steam in me right then, so I probably just
said, “Yeah, sounds great, get in touch…” A few months later, a mutual
friend said she was going down to visit S and her partner. “S really wants
to talk with you,” she said to me. “You should come with me…” So I
jumped aboard.
Well, S and I talked and talked til our jaws hurt during
that visit. And more importantly, I think, we began a conversation which
has continued all these years, in marathon chats every couple of months
since.
Sidebar here – to me there is little I treasure more than
these kinds of epic conversations that weave through my life. I have a few
such long chats going – some even since childhood – with someone who worries
some bone kind of like I do, or at least can bear to watch me do it while
offering up their own wisdom as we wander along in life. Sometimes I talk
with these people every couple of years, sometimes almost daily. As Dave
Alvin and Christy McWilson sang last night at the Little River Inn, “We’re two
lucky bums.” Or in my case, at least one lucky bum and one very patient
one.
Anyhow, back to the meaning of life. Between our last marathon
and the one this past weekend, S has made it official that she will be retiring
soon. Which seems to make questions of meaning in life more urgent – at
the very least since she will have forty-plus more hours each week available for
meaning-making in raw form. “How do you build a life?” she
asked.
Life is more than what you do in your work hours – more than what
you do at all. What you do, and, heaven-knows, what you plan to do, is
only the smallest part of it all. We agreed on that. Still, you get
up in the morning, and you are given a day in front of you. It’s an
opportunity as well as a challenge. This was the challenge and opportunity
that occupied us quite a bit over the weekend, as we dreamed and brainstormed
about how a brilliant, capable, skilled, healthy, generous and wise person could
reshape her pursuits at this juncture.
Another sidebar here, or maybe the
main point: Ira Rosenberg has taught over the years about the importance
of turning points. There are long stretches of time in which our paths are
fairly fixed, and it takes a tremendous amount of energy and upheaval to shift
course. But then there come times when the trajectory is changing
anyhow. And, at these turning points, even minute changes of direction can
have amplified consequence, for good or for ill. So what we do with
ourselves at turning points may not be of greater cosmic importance than what we
do with ourselves at any other time. But on the practical plane, it
matters a lot. Which is why, among many other things, much ritual focuses
on times of life change (like a bar or bat mitzvah), calendar change (like
bedtime prayers) and social change (like the inauguration of a new
president.)
Last month I wrote here about my exploration of mussar, which
we might say turns a close lens on the way that life moves from minute to
minute, even in periods where it seems like little is changing. We lose
our tempers, get sidetracked, close down our attention or goodwill. And
the work of mussar is to correct those small-seeming mis-directions. I
can’t remember if I actually said this in my column, but mussar makes me think
of peeling back the surface of an hour or a day of my life and seeing all these
tiny joints underneath, at any of which things can go amiss. S’s question
right now has to do, I think, with pulling back the lens, looking at a bigger
schema of paths, the choices of which will direct (at least to some degree –
along with chance, providence, inner and outer change and Mystery) years or
decades to come.
Yesterday was Sunday, which means that we all started
the day at our house listening to Will Shortz giving his puzzle on NPR Weekend
Edition. And that may have left S and me in puzzle mode as the day went
on. So I posed a puzzle to her, and I offer it to you too. Imagine
ten activities that seem valuable to you, arrayed along a spectrum. At one
end is the safest, most like what you do right-now. At the other end is
the scariest, most out-of-the-comfort-zone kind of activity you can
imagine. Then plot out eight other activities in the middle range.
When you’ve got your list of ten, think through your social network and try to
come up with a person you could go talk with who does each of the ten activities
you have named.
That’s the easy part of the puzzle – though S drove away
promising to send me her list of ten. The hard part comes next. Go
actually talk with each of these people. And, as you do, try to imagine
yourself into their lives, doing what they do.
Then watch yourself making
a decision. How do we know what to do next? Do we make lists of pros
and cons and count them up? Do we take up the first option that comes our
way and then see where it takes us from there? Do we wait for a light to
come on in our head? Do we feel for our gut to tighten in some places and
our heart to swell in others? Do we ask someone’s advice and actually
follow it? Do we pray for guidance and anticipate a response? Do we
feel trapped and hopeless, as though ten options – even imaginary ones – would
be unthinkable in our own circumstances?
I am aware as I’m writing this
that big course changes seldom come about as methodically and elegantly as they
happen to be coming to S. Sometimes they happen because we get sick or
lose a job or a partner or a home or are oppressed in our current situation and
have to get out. Sometimes, and I count myself blessedly here much of the
time these days, we are happy with our path, and nothing seems to be coming at
us to force a big change (until it does.) Sometimes the
challenge/opportunity is a tiny course change, or the will to endure until a
possibility opens up, or to make peace with the way things are and will probably
stay.
But it never hurts to exercise our imaginations. And what
topic could be more interesting than our lives? I hope that, even when
things seem tightly-constrained, we can still imagine other paths, large or
small, that we can walk in the direction of meaning. Whatever that
means!
I want to thank S, my companion in imagination, for
allowing me to share a bit of her life and our conversation about it here.
And I want to thank all of you for being a community of meaning, in which I can
see richly-imagined lives lived out in inspiring and provocative ways, and in
which the conversation about how to live a meaningful life never falters.
- Rabbi Margaret Holub (c) 2009