Iran’s Attack on Israel
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As Oct 7ᵗʰ showed us, life can be cut short. Now’s the time to make resolutions that express your true values and priorities.
October 7th brought home the reality how suddenly and drastically life can be cut short. You don’t know how many more days you have with your spouse, your parents and your children. Subconsciously you know this, but chances are you prefer to live as if you are certain of tomorrow.
Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals reminds us that if you’re fortunate enough to live 80 years, you have about four thousand weeks in total in your lifetime. The span of your life is terrifyingly short when you actually face the finitude of your days. But the reality of how finite your life is can also inspire you to make changes today instead of waiting for tomorrow.
The start of the new year is an opportune time to make different kinds of resolutions that express your true values and priorities.
Many of us are waiting for the right moment to begin. We think we need more knowledge, more time or more resources. We hold back from acting because we think we will reach a point when we know exactly what we are doing. But that moment will never come. And most opportunities don’t return. “We recoil from the notion that this is it - that this life, with all its flaws and inescapable vulnerabilities, its extreme brevity, and our limited influence over how it unfolds, is the only one we’ll get a shot at,” Burkeman writes. Whenever you can, force yourself to act even when the moment isn’t the exact perfect moment to begin.
Many people seek fulfillment through accomplishments that allow them to control their own schedules. But often the most meaningful aspects of life are found when you prioritize connection over independence. And the most satisfying goals usually involve helping or working with others. Burkeman writes, “…it’s scary to confront the truth that almost everything worth doing, from marriage and parenting to business or politics, depends on cooperating with others and therefore on exposing yourself to the emotional uncertainties of relationships.” The quality of life is largely determined by the quality of your relationships. In every area of your life that you can, seek out connection and commitment to the welfare of others.
Far too often people fail to make time for the goals and people that matter most to them because they are afraid to make the necessary trade-offs that they must make with their time. “Every decision to use a portion of time on anything represents the sacrifice of all the other ways in which you could have spent that time, but didn’t – and to willingly make that sacrifice is to take a stand, without reservation, on what matters most to you.” It’s true that you will never have time to do everything that you want to do, but you have the time to do the few, crucial things that count.
When you look at the time you are given through the lens of gratitude, four thousand weeks begins to look more like an undeserved gift rather than too little time. Burkeman astutely writes, “Or to put it another way, why treat four thousand weeks as a very small number, because it’s so tiny compared to infinity, rather than treating it as a huge number, because it’s so many more weeks than if you had never been born? Surely only somebody who’d failed to notice how remarkable it is that anything is in the first place, would take their own being as such a given-as if it were something they had every right to have conferred upon them, and never to have taken away. So. maybe it’s not that you’ve been cheated out of an unlimited supply of time; maybe it’s almost incomprehensibly miraculous to have been granted any time at all.”
You can’t know or control what the future holds. Many people have been struggling with the painful uncertainty during the war in Israel of what tomorrow will bring. It is challenging to accept that you cannot control the future, no matter how much you plan and how hard you try. “We go through our days fretting because we can’t control what the future holds; and yet most of us would probably concede that we got to wherever we are in our lives without exerting much control over it at all. Whatever you value most about your life can always be traced back to some jumble of chance occurrences you couldn’t possibly have planned for, and that you certainly can’t alter retrospectively now.” Only God knows what tomorrow will bring. Accept what you can’t control. As soon as you stop resisting the uncertainty of tomorrow, you can focus instead on doing what you can to help today.
Life isn’t about being free of problems. That is an impossible goal that you actually wouldn’t want to reach. Problems – aka challenges – mean that you are alive and that God believes in you enough to give you challenges that help you grow. Burkeman writes, “Once you give up on the unattainable goal of eradicating all your problems, it becomes possible to develop an appreciation for the fact that life just is a process of engaging with problem after problem, giving each one the time it requires - that the presence of problems in your life, in other words, isn’t an impediment to a meaningful existence but the very substance of one.”
May the new year bring peace and inspiration as you create resolutions that align with your deepest values.
Beautiful, thank you!
SHA (LO) M = SHAM LO, His name.
I noticed this one day. Perhaps a way to gain more SHALOM, peace, is by giving creidit to HIM (HaShem) or to HIM, another person, more than to ourselves.
For example, we might tell a story of something we worked at, and how HaShem or others seemed to play a key role. TNX so much for the inspiration