One day when I sitting on the therapist’s couch I may refer him to this post and say it is a starting point for when I realized I was in the midst of a transformation.
Or maybe I’ll tell him to listen to Ronnie Milsap sing It Was Almost Like A Song or David Soul’s piece here.
Maybe I’ll tell him to read Mr. Steiner’s piece More Than Heaven Will Allow or The Song Of My Heart Has Gone Silent.
Without question I’ll include Sarit Haddad singing כשהלב בוכה and talk about what the past year has awakened inside me.
I went to shul online today for a number of reasons one of which included being able to monitor the war because I felt a need to be connected in some way to family and friends in Israel.
I knew that a world that tried to stop us from fighting during Ramadan wasn’t going to extend the same courtesy during Yom Kippur.
Two Hours Down The Rabbit Hole
I spent two last night and another today reading through a set of messages on Facebook, most of which covered 2013 into part of 2014.
Took a solid two hours last night and at least another today in large part because I had to fight Facebook to read through them all.
I needed to confirm that my memory wasn’t flawed or faulty on some things. I needed to double check something my heart knew to be true so that my head was satisfied.
The conclusion met with my current beliefs and while that didn’t fix or correct certain things the way in which I would prefer it was enough.
Enough that I looked at a picture of some guy, rolled my eyes and muttered something about him being a placeholder if he was lucky. Then I deleted the photo and moved on.
****
Got Harry Chapin singing Taxi and a belly full of bagels and lox that I washed down with a small cup of coffee.
My personal goal with Yom Kippur is to conduct my own state of the union about my life. It is a time to ask myself the hard questions about what I am doing and who I am doing it with.
A time to confirm if I want to make changes and to begin to map those changes out. A time to prepare so when that time on the couch comes it is easier to identify the areas in which more assistance is needed in making some decisions.
So we move onto a live version of The Ecstasy of Gold and the decision to cross the rubicon and explore what lies upon the other side.
Someone told me long ago they thought I had a hard time with change and a hard time saying goodbye if I loved someone.
Were that conversation to be had today I would point out I have moved my entire life and uprooted everything on a couple of occasions.
It was never easy to do so, but it wasn’t ever beyond my capabilities. In regard to love, well if you are someone I love I never give up easily especially if I think circumstances have prevented a real and full experience.
Hard doesn’t frighten me but there isn’t anyone I can’t live without. I can walk away from love but it is not something I will do easily, not if I think it is worth fighting for.
Nor have I ever misunderstood that timing may provide its own challenges but that hasn’t ever stopped me from taking steps either.
Sometimes you walk into the unknown knowing you’ll walk alone for a time but confident that at some point another hand will be intertwined with your own.
Maybe it belongs to that whom you hoped it would or maybe it is someone new.
What Comes Next
And so here I am engulfed in the flames. I burn and I ache in ways that I cannot describe. The normal lines of communication have been severed. I move ahead on instinct and the belief that my gut will lead me to where it is we need to go. I have paid a severe price, but I would gladly pay it again.
I wrote that many years ago about a different situation than what we see in Israel. I wrote it as part of a piece that contained this ‘graph too not knowing I was foreshadowing.
There are moments that stick out, little fragments of time that I think foreshadowed your arrival. I remember nights in Jerusalem where I felt like there was someone waiting for me, felt a presence that I could never identify. I remember a time in Yosemite hiking through the hills where I felt like I was going to find someone.
Foreshadowing a time I could sense and feel in which the chaos of the past would merge with the present and we’d find ourselves being asked to justify defending ourselves against the proxies of a terrorist state.
In a short time Simchat Torah will arrive and our people will remember that Black Shabbat in a different way again.
Those of us outside of Israel aren’t being forced to run to the shelters or worry about whether our children will be killed or crippled while fighting for all of us.
But we aren’t exempt from the hate.
Many of our students undergo a gauntlet of hate on campus and are attacked or shamed for the actions of a country they don’t live in and whose elections they don’t vote in.
The Jew haters love this moment because they feel like they have been given license to run wild. They feast upon the ignorant and foist propaganda to support their agenda in large numbers to a large pool of useful idiots.
They ignore that Hezbollah started launching missiles into Israel on 10/8. They ignore that Israel hadn’t gone into Gaza and that Israel had no presence in Lebanon, no occupation to fight.
More than 300 rockets were fired at Israel on Yom Kippur, one of which hit an old age home. The haters don’t care or acknowledge no country would tolerate 12 months of rocket fire upon their citizens.
So they call the response an escalation because they don’t acknowledge the war in the north started last year.
But as Golda said we’d rather be alive and hated then dead and mourned.
We Don’t Lie Down
I haven’t decided if I’ll go to Oktoberfest in Southlake tomorrow or if I’ll stick around the house working on a never ending list of things to do.
Replaced a bad fill valve on a toilet already this weekend and cleared out a ton of mental and physical junk.
It has been a very challenging six or seven weeks that at times has required extra effort to refocus and reframe but I can see movement.
Some of that comes solely from putting one foot in front of the other and some from somewhere else. Life isn’t always easy, sometimes it is really hard but as I tell the children we don’t lie down.
We don’t give up.
I have beaten every bad day I have ever had and I am going to keep doing so.
****
This Yom Kippur has definitely been transformative. I don’t need to go the previous post and look at the pictures or even the mirror.
I can feel it and there is more to come, none of which is connected to the upcoming presidential election which will have its own share.
It is a hard time, but I am optimistic and I am working through the changes as I go because who I once was isn’t who I will continue to be.
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