I’ve decided to revive And You Shall Love. For the sake of brevity, I’ll just say that I have renewed my dedication to mindfulness and purposeful living.
And You Shall Love allows me to bridge the gap between my spiritual life and my mundane living.
Since I last updated this, I have started attending Torah Study at my shul every Saturday that I’m not working. This has been a pretty life-altering change for me. As a shift-worker, my life doesn’t follow the normal rhythms of workweek to weekend. I don’t work my shifts all together (as a means of self-preservation), so I often feel like I am hopping on and off of a very quick-moving treadmill several times a week.
I use the “I’m a shift-worker” excuse to justify my skipping-out on a lot of things that are probably good for me. Exercise, budgeting, etc.
A dear friend of mine was saying that a Modern Orthodox man once told her that Judaism is discipline, and that discipline is what makes us happy. At first glance this may appear an oversimplification of the concept, and maybe it is, but also maybe it isn’t.
So if we are betzelim elohim, then we have to recognize our natural propensity for order, for God is the ultimate orderer. Separating our light from dark and land from sea from sky. We like order, predictability, and structure. We thrive within it. The standard of order is what makes the extraordinary extraordinary.
Having the predictability of order unleashes our ability to relax and create (another of our divine characteristics).
According to Alan Morinis in Everyday Holiness,
“Disorder is often the child of a rebellious ego that resists humbly occupying a rightful space […] Order helps create an inner sense that the things that matter have been properly arranged and tended to and, as a result, that the details of life are under control. Calm and unworried, at that point the channels to the divine will are open and unencumbered as they can get, and the possibility of serving –and happiness– will have become real for you.”
Creating order is most important, because it allows us to see our spot on the shelf. Only by organizing the chaos can we see that we belong amongst it.
There is so much to unpack here, but I want to start with the idea of “occupying a rightful space.” This concept is so important and so challenging to me. The issue is identifying what my rightful space is. I often feel like I am suffocatingly large for my space, but occasionally also struggle with feeling imperceptibly small. Finding the rhythm of holding my space in every situation life throws at you can be challenging.
Another friend of mine is a yoga teacher/therapist/photographer/feminist lady boss. In a post on social media responding to the inherit threat to women’s bodies constructed by our very culture, she wrote
“I’m lucky that yoga has taught me I am more powerful than I ever thought. Yoga has been the conduit for me to take risks, to be bold, to take up space, to learn to listen to myself, to know what is kind for myself, to know what’s bullshit. Yoga has taught me to trust myself and what my body is telling me. “
Taking up space is OK. The important thing is to be mindful of that space. To celebrate it, to tend to it. To allow it to shift in unexpected ways. So these themes of order, space, and bodily autonomy have been on my mind a lot. It has also been a particularly tough time at work. Combine that with the constant thrill in my mind of shoulds (I should lose weight, keep my home cleaner, meditate, save more money, repaint my walls, be more grateful, volunteer more, spend more time outside, be a better friend, be a better sister, be a better daughter, be a better aunt, work harder at work, read more, be more,….).
If you put all of that into the ziplock bag of my mind and shake it all up, what you get is crippling anxiety and depression. Which doesn’t work for me. It tells me a lot of things, but I can’t live in that space.
So I woke up this morning, and went outside to dig in the dirt. Green spaces are sacred spaces for me. I am not a botanist or farmer. Anything that survives my “green thumb” is truly miraculous. But watching animals be animals, and plants be plants is just the best to me. In an impulse, I found that I wanted to go on a bike ride. My dad recently surprised me with a tune-up of my bicycle for Hanukkah so the time was ripe.
I chose not to listen to a podcast or music or anything. I decided to mindfully ride my bicycle without agenda. It wasn’t to burn calories or to go somewhere. It was just to experience the absolute joy of wind in your face after climbing a hill and allowing gravity to take you back down.
Three brisk and lovely miles later, I realized that I had discovered a thing that worked for me. My mind had been begging me for a break from books and podcasts and news and Netflix, but I had been ignoring it. Because my mind and the dark places hidden within it, scares me. But today, riding my old bicycle in the bright warm sunshine, I aired out some of those scary places.
Those three miles were so therapeutic for me. They were meaningful miles. They took me nowhere but took me everywhere. I am grateful to have had the bravery and the time to take that ride. 24 minutes well spent.
So I have decided that I would like to try 30 days of meaningful miles. I would like to try moving my body one meaningful mile, (by bike or leg), each day. A mile on my bicycle is 7 minutes of my time. Rarely do I give myself seven minutes of mindfulness. It is too easy, when sitting still to be distracted. By putting my body in motion, for at least one mile a day, I think I could experience some very real change in my life.
I’ll let you know how it goes. We will call today Day One. Cheers to 29 more.
And You Shall Love 