You’re driving your daughter to soccer, as you discuss this afternoon’s meeting on your [hands-free!] cell phone.
Your spouse is sharing the day’s anxieties. You work hard to listen, to disengage from that unpleasant clash at work, and simultaneously resist your impulse to lose yourself in your IPad.
You’re in synagogue, looking for connection and meaning, but your mind keeps wandering to yesterday’s disappointments and tomorrow’s possibilities.
You’re skimming life’s surface.
In life, there’s intellectual engagement and emotional investment. Then there’s basic functionality, your actions. The question, the hugely important challenge to a quality life, is: Will you pour your intellect and emotion into your functionality? Will you be engaged and present? Will your actions be genuine? Or will they be a shell?
Consider three possible scenarios:
You really adore a friend, and you know he’s fallen on hard times, so you treat him to a nice suit that he can wear for job interviews.
You have an acquaintance – not a particularly close one – and you hear he’s fallen on hard times. This saddens you; your heart tugs you to help this fellow in need. So you treat him to a nice suit that he can wear for job interviews.
You hear of a neighbor who’s fallen on hard times. You’re not particularly moved, but you can hear your grandparents’ words “never neglect someone in need”. You resolve to do the right thing. So – politely, but with no particular enthusiasm - you treat him to a nice suit that he can wear for job interviews.
In Chassidic, psycho-spiritual language, the first scenario represents total engagement. The brain is in gear and you’re into the experience. The second represents your own good nature, not a particular affection for this individual. Your heart is engaged.
The third represents a lower level of engagement. Your determination to DO the right thing. Your physical body – represented by the legs in Chassidic thought - is doing a Mitzvah; your mind and heart are elsewhere.
Jacob wrestled with an angel, fighting a battle – for the ages - with our weaker side.
While he won, his hip socket, where the thigh meets the body’s trunk, was injured; the sinew binding the thigh to the trunk was dislocated. That’s where we’re vulnerable: our weaker nature tends to separate our ‘leg’ – physical function –from our higher faculties. That’s where we get hurt. And where we hurt others.
It’s a battle of the ages. A daily struggle.
The measure of a life isn’t so much how many days we live, but how we live the days we have.
Engage. Live real.
Leon wrote...