A piece in the Times of New York entitled Train Yourself To Always Show Up deserves mention, I think. It tells the story of an old Judaic practice. There are many good lessons here, and the author writes so well that I will only quote from it and not thin it out with my scratchings.
A somewhat obscure text, about 2,000 years old, has been my unlikely teacher and guide for the past many years, and my north star these last several months, as so many of us have felt as if we’ve been drowning in an ocean of sorrow and helplessness.
Buried deep within the Mishnah, a Jewish legal compendium from around the third century, is an ancient practice reflecting a deep understanding of the human psyche and spirit: When your heart is broken, when the specter of death visits your family, when you feel lost and alone and inclined to retreat, you show up. You entrust your pain to the community.
Sharon Brous: Train Yourself To Always Show Up
We desperately need a spiritual rewiring in our time. Imagine a society in which we learn to see one another in our pain, to ask one another, “What happened to you?” Imagine that we hear one another’s stories, say amen to one another’s pain, and even pray for one another’s healing. I call this the amen effect: sincere, tender encounters that help us forge new spiritual and neural pathways by reminding us that our lives and our destinies are entwined. Because, ultimately, it is only by finding our way to one another that we will begin to heal.
Sharon Brous: Train Yourself To Always Show Up
Reading this I became interested in the author, who I found out was a rabbi of a Jewish community named Ikar, located out there in wicked, wicked Los Angeles. Going to Ikar’s website led me to a recorded talk she gave, and I am glad that I took the time in the early morning hours and listened. Really, it is amazing what listening can do for a person … perhaps I should do it more often. But how to do this when I have so many wise things to say … a puzzlement … indeed … when my mouth is open my ears seem to close up.
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The title of George Will’s column in the Washington Post on 1/16/24 really says it all, at least for him:
Iowa nudged the nation closer to a revolting rematch next fall
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While the title of Will’s op/ed is catchy and may be the opinion of scads of folks in both parties, it also raises some questions that perplex a certified moderate and highly sensible individual like myself.
- Is this the best that a country of 300 million can come up with as choices, or is it finally revealing that both parties have become little more than shiny but vacant shells of what they portray themselves to be?
- What if President Biden had spent time finding a good and solid replacement for himself, and then began working for the election of that person? Think what a service he would have done for his country, instead of dragging us kicking and nauseous and screaming into a Who’s more senile, you or me? contest.
And lastly, where in the heck is Waldo? And my car keys … how about them ?
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At long last our local theatre was showing a film that was not based on a comic book. So of course we went to the movies.
The film was “The Holdovers.” The action took place at a posh prep school in Massachusetts during the Christmas break. Held over at the school are a cook who is grieving her loss of a son, a curmudgeon of a professor, and a snotty and over-privileged kid.
It’s a story you’ve seen parts of before, but a story is all in the telling, and here the telling is very good.
In fact, Paul Giammati’s pipe-smoking professor was done so well that I began to get the itch to go pipe shopping, after quitting smoking thirty-plus years ago.
I thought … seriously … if I added a major vice at this age … wouldn’t be much of a big deal at all, would it? Of course I’d have to puff away outdoors, and not in my comfortable den like the professor did. Nahhh. I forgot about the coughing and the stained teeth and the burned tongues.
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Sometimes like this morning I am overcome. Images, regrets, confusions of the past wash over me like a monstrous wave as when the Atlantic Ocean shows its truest face, black and cold and green and terrible. I am drowning before I know what is happening and can get my defenses up. There is sand in my hair and tears and saltwater in my mouth and I am swept from my chair with time to take only one long breath before I wash up against the wall and then the wave recedes, leaving me gasping and shivering.
I think … what a small thing I am to have worn so completely through my welcome here on earth.
And then I wonder, what’s for breakfast?
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Explored another Nordic ski area on Tuesday, one we’d never visited. It is up on the Uncompaghre Plateau, 24 miles from our home, at an altitude of around 9500 feet. They are called the Divide Road Nordic Trails. The area is an all-volunteer project so we made a small monetary contribution since we’d done no work at all.
Good snow, trails well marked, and not too technically challenging. The day was perfect for what we were doing. After skiing for a few kilometers, though, I was wearing thin. I collapsed a few feet from our car and would have been perfectly happy to have been left there lying in the road but Robin forced me to rise and join her in the automobile, mumbling something about my bad behavior and what would the neighbors say.
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Little Home In The Valley 
Thank God for breakfast. Take heart.
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