Embracing Life: Finding Joy in the Present Moment

I went out for a short treat with my eight-year-old daughter. We passed a place full of beautiful flowers in various colors.

"Do you see these flowers?", I asked her. "Do you know why they are here?".

"Why?" She perked up, ever the curious child.

"So we can have fun," I said, picking one for us.

"What do you mean?" she didn’t quite get it.

"Hashem put them here for us to enjoy. They’re pretty, right?! They have no other purpose in the world other than to bring joy, so I understand that what Hashem wanted was for us to feel good and have fun here."

She naturally picked a beautiful one for herself and continued to skip along.

But I was left with thoughts. I meet too many women who are afraid to enjoy the moment, who are caught up in survival mode, taking themselves away instead of living in the now.

This week, I met someone in my clinic who shared that it’s hard for her to feel. She operates like a robot. No emotions, neither negative nor positive (usually the result of unresolved trauma).

"Take a moment to look around this room," I asked her, praying she would succeed. "It’s a quarter to twelve on Wednesday. Do you see where you are? Can you feel your body touching the chair? The blood flow in your legs? You know, this moment right now – it is life itself."

"What do you mean?" she asked curiously.

"Right now, in this minute, life is happening itself," I said to her, "you and I, two souls brought together by Hashem this morning, are sitting here, and something is happening at a very deep level."

"What’s happening?" she tried to understand.

"We still don’t know, but we don’t need to force understanding; it’s already simply happening here and now, what a soulful healing is occurring in this specific moment, in this specific room, in this minute."

"Wow," I saw her realizing something suddenly. "You know, I always remember what was and how it was... and it’s the first time I am able to feel how it is now. Something is happening now." We managed to isolate one moment out of the melting others, and give it space.

Life has a natural and healing flow; we just need to not interfere.

Even our breakdowns are part of this natural flow. This week I spoke with someone who said to me: "I've started planting. I love seeing the natural process they go through from seed to something beautiful... I just stand in front of the hard ground where I planted a seed, and I say: "Hey, seed. I know what you’re going through. I know how it feels to break down and then be reborn. I’m familiar with that experience from my own life...".

"For man is like a tree of the field," I said to her, enjoying her juicy description.

Even sleep is a natural process meant for our healing. I heard from a psychiatrist that during sleep we undergo a process of emotional healing at a very deep level. Memories enter their proper folders and cells, experiences we’ve had are processed during sleep, and many more healing processes related to relationships and other areas in our lives (that’s why someone who doesn’t sleep well at night suffers greatly emotionally).

So Why Are We Not Content?

Fact is a job – loving what is is not easy.

Accepting the facts in our lives. Not fighting to change them. Letting go is a lifelong work. What can help is first to understand that control is, in any case, a fiction. It’s a bit like pushing a bus once it’s already moving.

Letting go is not giving up. The desperate and depressed voice inside me says, "Listen, it hasn’t worked for you up until now… so it will never work. You haven’t changed until now… so you’ll never change. You’ve failed at this so many times… so you’ll never succeed!". This is not acceptance of the facts. This is despair.

We do so many things in our daily lives, things that happen naturally, by the mere movement of the flow of life. Someone told me this week: do you want me to detail the things I do as a mom when needed? Then she began to torrent at high speed: plumber / technician / electrician / exterminator / seamstress / actress / gym teacher or rather physiotherapist / mediator / art or crafts teacher / summer camp counselor / doctor / nurse / babysitter, fortune teller... how true that is!

One woman once published in a newspaper a list of eighty professions that mothers work in from time to time, and said: just calculate the salary! Honestly, every Jewish mother deserves a double salary, and it is indeed waiting for her in the World to Come, in the mercy of Hashem.

So Why Do We Often Feel Discouraged?

Imagine a source of light on the balcony. How many flies and fleas will come there? Since every Jew is a very large light, all the weakening forces of the world come to bring us down and humiliate us, and our task is to not forget that we are a great light, to keep strengthening ourselves and spreading our light despite everything.

Rabbi Nachman of Breslov says: "You must not grow old!".

King Solomon refers to the evil inclination as "an old and foolish king".

He is foolish because he gives me bad advice. He is a king because it’s too easy to obey him.

And Rabbi Nachman teaches that he is old… because he makes me feel old. Old, like someone who has seen and knows everything, and who no longer has a burning desire for change.

So What Do We Do?

Simply.

Always do something new that you have never done before.

Pray in a new melody you invented today, eat different food than you’re used to, buy a product you’ve never bought at the store (like a new scent for your laundry softener), wear an outfit that gives you a slightly different look, go to a place you’ve never been, talk to someone you normally wouldn’t speak to, cook a dish you’ve never cooked. Learn sentences in a language you don’t know, dance, sing, meditate in front of the waves at the beach.

In short, you get the idea?! Do anything you’re not used to doing in your daily life.

To break free from stagnation, you need to allow your creativity to work. Inside you is a small, curious, sweet girl who has dimmed with the years, who has somewhat forgotten what it means to live, to roll new flavors on her tongue... this week invest a little in her, let her breathe fresh air.

Set out on a new and youthful journey, and may Hashem bring you to places you’ve never dreamed of, and don’t forget to speak to the One who created you about all this new process in your life.

"But Hashem already knows everything," one sweet girl told me. "What’s the point of telling Him?".

Thousands of years ago, we left Egypt, and we constantly tell that story, in all its details. What we had there and how hard it was. And it’s even a commandment: "We are commanded to tell of the exodus from Egypt".

What kind of commandment is that? After all, Hashem knows exactly what we went through, and even if He didn't know – we’ve already told it so many times.

Growing up is somewhat like leaving Egypt. Each of us has our private stories of exodus, the journey we went through in our childhood, at home, in society, in self-image, at the beginning of our marriages. Each one carries the side that was handed to them.

From healing our exiled souls, it’s to sit and tell Hashem all the details. How I feel, how it relates to what I’ve been through, to cry about how hard it was, and to emerge anew each time.

A good renewal.

Ruthie König is a writer, emotional therapist, and workshop leader for breaking through barriers.

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