Practice (Gevurah)

Practice… We talkin’ about practice? - Allen Iverson

I have been resisting this practice. I have not been wanting to write about practice. For more than two weeks I have been thinking about practice. I have been writing and not knowing what to write. I tried putting it aside and writing about something else, but that didn’t work either. On continued reflection I began to wonder if my resistance has something to teach me. This is the seventh gevurah entry in this writing practice. Somewhere in the back of my mind, this practice was always going to be seven cycles long, forty-nine weeks of reflection, nearly a year of weekly writing.  

Is this struggle I’m finding myself in some kind of resistance to an ending that I have been anticipating in my subconscious, perhaps semi-conscious, mind? Is it akin to putting down a book with twenty pages left because I don’t want it to end? Is it a version of the “out of character” behaviors that young people display at the onset of an ending they are nervous about? Am I experiencing separation anxiety manifesting as severe writer's block? 

Or is it simply a manifestation of my life long paradoxical relationship with the idea of practice itself? 

As a child I could sit for hours with my legos building worlds, creating stories with characters I had imagined. It was a kind of practice - playing out stories that reflected the world I was learning to live in. It was a practice I was committed to, a practice I looked forward to, a practice I put many hours into on a consistent and regular basis. At the same time, this consistency, this commitment to practices was completely absent in my life at school. Throughout my childhood, from elementary through highschool, the most consistent comment I would receive on my report cards was: Jonah’s quality of work is erratic. My teachers were uniformly aghast at my simultaneous ability to produce quality work and inability to do it consistently. 

This continued into my college years. I very rarely did my homework and when my friends tried to get me to join a study group my response was to claim that studying was cheating. I had a roommate who could not understand my work habits. He would often come home to find me reading on the couch but it would almost never be a book that had been assigned by one of my classes. He would rebuke me for having no discipline. I countered by saying that I had a lot of discipline, but only when it came to things I cared about. This, he claimed, was not discipline. 

A few years later when I started working as a teacher I relied heavily on my improvisation skills, my ability to adapt to the situation in front of me, my penchant for meeting the moment, for being responsive to the emergent needs of my students. I took pride in the fact that I never taught the same curriculum twice. In this way I was devaluing the notion of practice. 

But simultaneously my late adolescence and early adulthood, the years that I was in college and teaching high school, was the time that I was building practices that would stay with me, that would ground and center me throughout my life. In college, while I was scoffing at study groups I was also building an annual Yom Kippur journaling practice that continues more than twenty-five years later. While rejecting the value of consistency and repetition in my teaching career, I was also building a practice of making challah and hosting shabbat dinners. This practice of bread making which requires consistency and repetition has become a staple of my life. 

And then there is this practice itself. Nine years ago I was invited into a practice of writing about the sefirot as a method of counting the Omer. For eight years, when the Omer came around I would join several friends in a shared google doc and write each day, for seven straight weeks - 49 days of writing. 

Up until that moment I don’t think there had been a time in my life in which I did anything for 49 days in a row. It was the most consistent I had ever been about anything. And through that practices I learned a few things about myself, I recognized a few patterns about the kinds of practices that work for me. For the most part what has worked for me is to build my practices in the container of the Jewish calendar: Yom Kippur Journaling, Challah making on Shabbat, writing (or this year leading a guided meditation) during the Omer, this writing practice itself which was tied to shabbat and the weeks in a year. It seems that I enjoy practices that are time bound, that either have an end in sight or have something outside of myself to create a temporal container around them.

There are other practices I have developed, but more than any specific practices, what I have learned over the years is the practice of practice. I have come to see the ways that having practices gives me structures that allow me to return to myself. I have come to see the ways that embodying the notion of practice, slowing down to bring intention and choice into each moment, helps me ground, helps me be present, allows me to show up stronger and in line with how I want to be in the world on a more consistent basis.

Compassion (Chesed)

Twice this week I had the opportunity to deepen my understanding of compassion: what it is, why it is so important, and what it requires of us.

While leading a group coaching conversation, there was someone in the group that I was having a hard time finding compassion for. The person was saying things that I fundamentally disagree with, that I experience as hurtful, and that I think are patently untrue. As the group leader my job was to support this person, to be present for them. And, my job was to model for this person and the entire group how to support and make space for a person I disagree with while also not allowing their untrue and hurtful comments to be accepted as gospel. As I sat there, listening to this person passionately claim things from a perspective that was entirely foreign to the way I see and understand the world, wondering how I was going to respond, how I was going to engage in this conversation without turning it into a fruitless debate about facts, I started to think about what compassion would ask of me in this moment. 

Compassion asks me to hear what this person is saying from their point of view, from their experience, from their pain, from their fear. Compassion tells me that I cannot judge someone from a place of my experience, of my sensibilities, my orientation, my social and emotional maturity. Compassion reminds me that I cannot dismiss someone just because I think they are wrong, just because I cannot understand how it is that they have come to think and believe what they have come to think and believe. Compassion calls upon me to offer grace even to a person who is not offering it back. Compassion is not a transactional quality, it is not something to withhold simply because it cannot be returned. It may in fact be the case that the moments when compassion cannot be returned are the most important moments to offer it. 

So I listened, I heard their pain, I felt their fear, I understood what they were and were not going to be able to hear from me, and I responded in a way that honored their humanity without agreeing with their statements, without accepting their assumptions. I found a parcel of a truth that I could agree with, acknowledged that truth, and I offered a gentle challenge and a broader perspective. I certainly did not change this person’s mind but I did give them space to feel heard, I did offer them a window into a different way of thinking, and I have to hope that in doing so I could help loosen the grip that their fear held them so tightly inside of.

Perhaps I was so easily able to call on my compassion in this moment because I had been practicing it all week, because I had already confronted those parts of myself that are most resistant to offering compassion, because I had already been in conversation with the things that make compassion so difficult for me. 

Earlier this week I spent time reconnecting with a past partner. It had been several years since our separation and the time that had passed, as well as the healing work that we each had done, allowed us to enter into conversations that were not available to us during our time together. One of the things we talked about was the way that each of us carried heartbreak in the aftermath of our relationship. 

This conversation challenged a set of assumptions that I carried for most of the time since our separation. How could she be heartbroken about us not being together when I had wanted us to be together and she was not choosing it? For most of the intervening years I did not have space to acknowledge her heartbreak because I was so consumed with my own. In my mind there was a simple truth: if she was feeling heartbroken about us not being together then she could just choose for us to be together, and if she wasn’t choosing that, then she didn’t get to be heartbroken about us not being together. 

But compassion demands that I step out of my own experience and see the experience of the other person. Compassion demands that I understand that even if something feels very simple to me, that doesn’t mean that it is simple to someone else. Compassion demands that I release my story, my version of reality, and accept that someone else might be experiencing our shared reality differently, might even be experiencing our shared reality from inside of a different paradigm than my own. 

I truly did not understand how she could feel rejected by me because, in my reality, I was clearly stating that what I wanted was for us to be together. In the reality I was operating from, being together was the pinnacle of connection, so to me when I would say, “I want to be with you but if you don’t want to be with me then I can’t have you in my life because it would be too painful for me”, there was no rejection in that statement. It was I who was being rejected because in the paradigm I was inside of there was choosing to be together or there was rejection. In her paradigm, knowing that she was loved and would be loved no matter what was the pinnacle of connection, so if being loved felt at stake, then rejection was also at stake. To her when I said, “I want to be with you but if you don’t want to be with me then I can’t have you in my life because it would be too painful for me”, it felt like an ultimatum, it felt like rejection.

In realizing this, in seeing that we were operating from different paradigms of love and relationship, paradigms that understand connection and rejection differently, I was able to loosen the grip I had been holding on my own pain, on my version of the story, on my need to be right and righteous. Or perhaps it was the loosening of my grip on those things that allowed me to have the space for this realization, that allowed me to have the space to see the difference in the paradigms that we were operating in, that allowed me the space to have compassion. 

If I am to have compassion then I have to let go of my pain, I have to let go of the preciousness of my story, of my own victimhood. Compassion demands that I put my own experience aside so that I might see, feel, and understand what another person might be experiencing. And even if I cannot see, feel, or understand, compassion demands that I imagine, that I try. Compassion demands that I believe that there is truth in what another person says even if, and especially when, it is a truth that I do not see or cannot understand. 

Knowing (Malkhut/Shechinah)

“We must believe in free will. We have no choice” - Isaac B. Singer

I have, for a very long time, been fascinated by the way that we make choices, by the different factors that people consider, by the various ways that we weigh those factors, by what each of us chooses to prioritize, and by where we understand our decisions to be coming from. 

Choices come in many shapes and sizes. There are the small choices that we have to make every day: what am I going to eat? Which route am I going to take on my way to work? What movie or show am I going to watch while procrastinating some bit of housework or, in my case, writing that I should be doing? And then there are the big choices: what job or course of study am I going to pursue? Where am I going to live? Which out of the box opportunity am I going to follow? When I reflect on my relationship with choice, I think I have had a much easier time with the bigger, more consequential choices than I have with the smaller, daily ones. 

For many years I had a reputation for being very indecisive. When out to dinner with friends I would painstakingly vasulate between menu options, never quite able to settle on the “right choice”. I could spend hours in the grocery story walking between isles, unsure of what to put in my cart. Inevitably I would arrive back at home with grocery bags full of ingredients for full meals but nothing that I really wanted to eat.  Occasionally while walking down the street with some unscheduled time I would find myself pacing back and forwarth unable to decide if I wanted to spend that time writing in a cafe, reading in a bookstore, or making a phone call from a park bench. Often my entire free hour would go by as I paced back and forwarth stuck in decision paralysis. 

Despite all of this, I never really identified as being indecisive. Yes, I experienced decision paralysis. Sure, I would get stuck in spirals of indecision. Certainly, I would lose all sorts of time in the uncertainty of what it was that I wanted. But all of this lived side by side with another truth: When I knew what I wanted, I knew what I wanted. In the moments that I could connect with a true knowing, there was zero room for doubt, there was no place for indecision, the concept of decision itself didn’t even seem to be at play. 

This clear knowing does occasionally show up in moments of daily life but those moments are small enough that I don’t even register them as choices, they are simply moments where I know what I want. It is only when the stakes are raised, when there is a clear choice point or decision moment that the question of a true knowing comes into play. 

The first time I remember having a big decision to make I was twelve years old. I was walking with my dad up the main commercial street in my town and we were talking about my upcoming Bar Mitzvah. I had already been studying my torah portion, I had already started working on the speech I was going to give, but there was one element of the Bar Mitzvah that I had been avoiding making a decision about: the party. What kind of celebration did I want to have? 

Because I was young for my grade, I had already been to a number of Bar Mitzvah parties and, for the most part, they didn’t feel like me. I wasn’t the most social twelve year old and the idea of a big party with a DJ and a lot of fanfare did not feel in line with who I was or what I valued. I didn’t want to do what the other kids had done simply because that’s what was expected, but I also wanted to do something. I wanted to mark the moment, I just wasn’t excited about any of the options that seemed to be available to me. I had no clarity, there was no knowing, and that made it feel impossible for me to decide what I wanted. How could I choose something if there wasn’t something that I knew I wanted? 

Five years later I faced another, perhaps even more consequential, choice: what was I going to do after graduating high school. Again, I was not thrilled with the options in front of me. Most of my peers were going directly to college and, while part of me was excited about the possibilities that came with that choice, I wasn’t entirely sold on the idea of jumping right into more school. I remember sitting with my mom in the basement of my childhood home talking through all of the options in front of me and not being clearly excited about any of them, not having a clear knowing around what I should do. 

In each of those cases, after much deliberation, I settled on a choice: my Bar Mitzvah concluded with a post service brunch for family and a few choice friends but no real party, and I went directly from highschool to college. In each of these cases I stand by the choice I came to but in neither of these cases did those choices have the most profound or lasting impact on my life. 

When I think about the most pivotal moments in my life, the times where I took actions that had the greatest impact, the longest lasting or most transformational effect on who I was, how I lived, or what I would spend my time doing, choice didn’t feel like a factor at all. Or perhaps more accurately would be to say that in those cases the choice was only ever between whether I would follow my true knowing or whether I would not.

My first true knowing came to me in the middle of my Junior year in college. I knew, from somewhere deep in my core, that I was done with being in school. With the help of my father I figured out how to graduate a semester early. After graduating and taking what would have been that final semester to work, travel, and recenter myself, I knew that I wanted to go to graduate school to become a teacher. By my fourth year teaching I knew that it was time for me to leave teaching to start a summer camp.  

In none of these moments did I feel like I was operating from a place of choice or decision. I was clear about what was important to me, I was clear about what I wanted, I was clear about what I was here to do, about the direction my life was pointing me towards. In each of these moments I had a clear knowing. And the more experience I have had with there being things that I deeply know, the less interest I have in operating from the place of decision. 

When I feel most myself I am operating from a place of choice, I am operating from a place of knowing. It is only when I do not have a clear knowing that I am subject to the torturous state  of being in choice.

Creativity (Yesod)

Around the time that I was twelve years old, my primary area of interest started shifting from sports (specifically baseball), to the arts (specifically theater). It must have partially been due to the fact that I wasn’t very good at sports, but it also had to do with the way that I was starting to find a voice, a persona, a sense of belonging in the world of middle school theater. I had started acting in the school plays and was part of a cast that traveled to perform at the town’s elementary schools. Being on stage was a thrill, but even more exciting was getting to be part of a whole production. We were a little community, a group of middle school students who got to miss school for the sake of something fun, something different, something creative. 

Through the rest of middle school and all throughout high school the theater became my home inside of school. It was the place where I found my closest friends, the place where I could escape from the stress and boredom of high school, and the place where I could explore my creativity. In addition to being onstage I learned how to operate the light and sound board, I helped build out sets, and in my junior year I got the chance to direct a play. 

But even more than the productions that I loved, it was the community and our culture of creativity that was most meaningful to me. Whether it was a theater class, after school drama club, or the games we made up backstage, it was the practice of thinking and acting creatively that was most impactful on me. While the rest of my school life felt confining, rote, and unbearably scripted, the theater was a place of improvisation, a place where I learned to think on my feet, where I learned to solve problems. While the rest of my classes were trying to fill my head with answers that people before me came up with to the problems that they encountered, the theater was where I learned to imagine answers that didn’t exist yet to challenges that were right in front of me. 

The other place in my life where I got to practice creativity was my summer camp. Around the same time that I was directing plays and being given keys to the light booth of my school auditorium, I was becoming a counselor at the summer camp I grew up going to. At sixteen years old, before I was allowed to drive, I was given a group of ten year olds to be responsible for, and I thrived in the role. There was something about the responsibility of it that unlocked a confidence in me that had previously been dormant. Standing in front of this group of rowdy ten year olds, I found myself knowing what to do, I found myself engaging my problem solving skills, I found myself able to imagine answers to the challenges that were now in front of me. 

This in the moment problem solving, this thinking on my feet, this instinct I discovered I had for imagining answers to emergent challenges became a key element of the person I was growing into, of the way I was beginning to understand myself in the world. And once unlocked, the confidence I had in these abilities grew more and more with every new challenge that I faced, with every new responsibility I took on. 

Responsibility, it turned out, not only unlocked my confidence, it unlocked my creativity. The more I was relied on to figure things out, to find out of the box solutions to out of the box problems, the more comfortable I became stretching my imagination, the more comfortable I became thinking outside of all of the boxes. 

Camp soon became a blank canvas where my creativity could thrive. With my newfound confidence and emerging creativity I began designing entire day-long immersive activities that brought elements of the theater into the camp’s educational programming. 

That outlet, that space to practice and to play, widened my understanding of where creativity lived and what it could be applied to. I knew fairly early in my high school theater career that I was never going to be an artist in a traditional sense, but the opportunity to unlock, practice, and build my muscles of creativity in the world of camp, in the world of experiential design, allowed me to see other pathways for centering creative expression in my life and my work, allowed me to expand my understanding of what an artist could be, and allowed me to feel comfortable seeing myself as one.

Vulnerability (Hod)

Vulnerability is a prerequisite to love 
Vulnerability is asking for help
Vulnerability is sharing how I feel 
Vulnerability is taking an emotional risk
Vulnerability is speaking my truth
Vulnerability is saying a hard thing without knowing how it will be received
Vulnerability is being open to being seen

I don’t often get nervous before having to speak in front of an audience. I have had enough experience and done enough work around being seen to find a place of comfort in the front of a room. The idea of everyone’s eyes on me no longer feels like a risk, no longer makes me feel especially vulnerable. 

On Sunday afternoon, at the opening of a four day conference I am on the faculty of, I led 400 people in a guided visualization and grounding breath practice. Sitting on the stage I felt calm and grounded, steady in my voice, confident in my ability to hold the room. But over the course of the conference there were three moments that did push me to the edges of my comfort, that did feel like risks, that did bring up a felt sense of vulnerability. 

On Monday night, as my co-facilitators and I were setting up our evening session, I could feel my nerves showing up. The steadiness of the previous afternoon was gone from my body, my breath arhythmic, and my mind racing. In the session we were preparing to lead, my role was to perform a version of toxic masculinity in which I would not pay attention while one of my co-presenters was speaking and then interrupt her to give the participants contradictory instructions. It was a session we had led twice before and each time the unannounced role play went so well that participants found themselves shooting daggers of ire in my direction even beyond the moment it was revealed that I had been acting and the entire scene had been created to bring into the room one of the more common experiences of patriarchal masculinity that shows up in the communities where we work. 

Even though it was a role play and even though it was made clear in the room that I was just playing a character, acting in that way did not feel good in my body. To paint myself the villain in the exercise, to act out the embodiment of a set of values behaviors that I’ve been working so long to flush out of my system pushed me to the edge of my comfort zone. Although it was a character that I was playing, I felt like showing up in such a way might put at risk the relationships I had been cultivating. Although it was a character I was playing, it felt vulnerable putting myself on display to be judged, analyzed, critiqued.

On Tuesday night, I stayed up late to participate in a Machloket, an argument for the sake of heaven. I sat in conversation with two friends and colleagues in front of an audience of conference attendees and talked openly and with love about the differences in our perspectives, thoughts, and feelings about Israel, the war in Gaza, protests on college campuses, and the larger context that the last two years have been situated in. 

In this conversation the vulnerability came not from playing a role, but from speaking my own truth. In this conversation I spoke from my own perspective, shared openly the questions that I have been wrestling with, posed challenges that I found in my friends’ arguments, and invited challenges to my own. In this conversation I got to model how speaking vulnerably in a container of love can open up space for people who disagree to listen with curiosity and actually hear each other. 

At the end of the conversation, one of our trio turned to the audience and, gesturing to me and our third, said, “One thing I have to say about this conversation is that I love the two of them more than I did an hour ago.” On that we could agree. 

On Wednesday night I found myself in a third consecutive fishbowl - this time by circumstance, not by design. After the conference ended, the participants departed, and the faculty had our final meeting, a few of us went into a side room to watch game one of the NBA Eastern Conference Finals between the New York Knicks and the Indiana Pacers. The game had started during our meeting but a few of us decided to watch the game on delay so we could experience it from start to finish. Inside the room we were a group of Knicks fans doing everything we could to avoid finding out what was happening in the game before we got a chance to experience it for ourselves. Outside the room some of our friends who were less invested in the outcome of the game turned it on to watch in real time. 

As we in the tape delayed room were getting closer to the end of the game we started to notice a flurry of activity outside our room. People started gathering in the hallway, looking in through the windows. A few times people walked in and out to see where we were in the game. It was a bizarre experience. There were moments where I began to feel self-conscious, as though I was somehow on display. These people who were living in my future, who had knowledge about something that would emotionally impact me were gathering around to watch me have an emotional experience. 

In the final minutes of the fourth quarter the Pacers were in the midst of a terrifying comeback and we in the room started getting very nervous. As the clock wound down the star player on the Pacers fired the ball towards the basket. It was a ridiculous shot and in the moments that the ball was bouncing around the rim I could feel inside of me my desire for the ball to not go in fighting against a deep knowing that this must be the reason they were all standing around watching us. They must all be watching to see how we in the room would react to our team losing a game we had been winning on an outrageous and devastating basket. 

As the ball went through the hoop I sunk out of my chair and onto the floor - a moment, I later learned, that was captured on a friend's camera. 

Reflecting on this moment I wondered what the vulnerability that I felt was rooted in: being seen in the ridiculousness of my sports fandom, being seen having a genuine emotional reaction to a game, getting to experience devastation at the entirely mundane and unimportant in a space where I had been taking on some of the heavier and heftier topics of conversation? Once I came out of the haze of a frustrating loss, the annoyance of being watched in my moment of despair, and the discomfort of being on display, I was able to experience something different. In reflection, I could see and feel the way that my wholeness was being celebrated, I could understand that by seeing more of me, by seeing a raw and unfiltered version of me, people in the community could feel closer to me.

In each of these moments where I found myself on display, bumping up against an edge of my comfort zone, and allowing a part of myself to be or feel at risk, I noticed that my vulnerability allowed the people who were watching me to feel more comfortable at their own edges, to feel less at risk when sharing their own stories, to invite into the room their own vulnerabilities, and to find themselves feeling closer to each other.

Curiosity (Netzach)

I am spending the week as faculty for a professional development conference for counselors who work at Jewish summer camps. On the morning after faculty arrived I walked into the office where all of our supplies are laid out to check on the materials I requested for my sessions. In my cubby area, next to my other supplies, there was a tie-dyed onesie jumpsuit that I had never seen before and did not request. 

At first glance it looked like it was a hoodie and I thought, well, it’s a little cooler than I expected, maybe I’ll wear it. When I picked it up and realized it was a onesie I decided that I definitely had to wear it. I had maybe two seconds of wondering where it came from: whether someone put it with my things by accident, or someone saw it and thought I’d like it. But it was there and fit perfectly, so I put it on and went up to breakfast. 

Several people commented on how much they liked it. A few people asked where I got it. I told them I found it with my supplies. One of my friends was entirely dissatisfied with this answer. What do you mean you just found it with your supplies? He asked. Don’t you want to know how it got there? Don’t you want to know who put it there? The truth was, I hadn’t really thought about it. I knew someone must have put it there, but I really didn’t think about who it was, or why they did it. 

This was not at all good enough for my friend. Throughout the day he kept on asking me if I learned anything more about where it came from and was astonished at how much I was not interested, how I could not have any curiosity about where this onesie came from, how I could just see it in my supply area and put it on without needing to know why it was there, without needing to know the backstory.

I think part of what might have been confusing for him was that he knows me to be a very curious person, someone who is not quick to accept things at face value, someone who is consistently driven to seek the deeper meaning, someone who wants to understand the why and the how of pretty much everything.

I am not entirely sure why the unexpected arrival of a perfectly fitting, playful outfit amongst my program materials did not evoke my curiosity. I’m not sure why the part of me that loves to solve a mystery is not chasing clues and trying to figure this out. Perhaps this experience evoked a different version of curiosity, a more internal curiosity; a curiosity that was less interested in where this costume came from or why it was there, and more interested in what it would feel like to wear it, how it might impact me to adorn myself in a playful costume.  

I wonder about these and other versions of curiosity: curiosity about how things came to be, curiosity about how things are experienced, curiosity about what will happen in the future. As someone who has spent a lot of my life pointing my curiosity towards the past, towards understanding and making meaning of things that happened before, I feel proud of myself for not immediately fixating on the origin of this tie dyed onesie. It feels like growth that I am engaging in the version of my curiosity that is interested in tactile experience, that is interested in the impact that my encounter with something unknown and unexplainable might be. 

What this experience is teaching me is that curiosity is multidimensional, and dynamic. Curiosity looks backwards and forward, searching for meaning out of what has been and what might come to be. Curiosity moves through time preparing us to be in relationship with that which came before our arrival, that which is currently happening, and that which has yet to be. Curiosity invites me to look around me and understand that in every object, every place, and every being there is a story to explore of how it came to be here; there is meaning to make out of what it is currently doing and how I might relate to it; and there is an imagined future of where it might take me, where it might go, or what it might become. Curiosity invites me to be interested in all of those questions about any of the things that might cross my path.

Harmony (Tiferet)

It was either my junior or senior year in high school. I vividly remember walking up the path to the main entrance of the school in animated conversation with a few friends of mine. Animated conversation was one of my primary forms of communication during my high school years. The topic of the conversation could have been anything from sports to politics to existential philosophy, but on this particular day the topic was my sleep patterns. 

I was coming off a weekend retreat with my camp community where I got little to no sleep and was preparing to have very little time to sleep in the coming week because of the rehearsal schedule for the school play. I was trying to convince my friends that I would be fine without the sleep because I had spent the two weekends prior filling my body with rest and had built up a reserve that would get me through the stretch run. My friends were having none of it. “That isn’t how sleep works”, they yelled. “It’s how it works for me” was my response. 

I think one of the more frustrating aspects of arguing with me at that time in my life was that my primary interest in many of our conversations was not coming to a universal or even consensus understanding of the topic, rather my aim was building an articulable understanding of how I worked. 

I knew that there was a kernel of truth in the story I was telling about my biorhythms. I could tell in some way that I was not built for repetitive energetic output that occurred on a regular basis. I knew at the core of my being that the rhythms of school with its daily schedule that followed the same rhythms over the course of ten months with very few interruptions was not harmonious with my way of being. I knew and was building a mountain of evidence that productions that required high energy output over short periods of time were much more in line with the way my body preferred to operate. I thrived in the rhythm of the school plays, the summer camp I worked at, and even intensive class projects in ways that I never could in the long and drawn out rhythm of the conventional school year. 

This developing understanding of myself, which I was in no way able to articulate at the time, was the context in which I argued about building up my sleep reserve. In the end I don’t think we ever came to a resolution of that argument. It is likely that the bell rang and we had to walk into class. But the moment, the feeling in my body, stayed with me. As frustrating as I must have been to argue with, it was also frustrating for me that my friends wouldn’t believe a truth that was coming from my own body. Their arguments were all coming from things that we had learned about sleep. My argument was coming from my own lived experience. The frustrating thing for me in those moments was that my lived experience about who I was and how my body worked was not believed, was not being taken seriously. 

Eventually I stopped arguing so much, I stopped trying to convey these truths about me. I did not stop trying to understand myself, I did not stop listening to what my body was telling me, but I did stop inviting others into that conversation. And perhaps, by not sharing it, by not speaking openly about it, there was a part of me that stopped being so sure of the truths that my body held, a part of me that began measuring myself against what conventional wisdom said was supposed to be instead of measuring myself against what my body knew to be true. 

There is a classic Jewish story that has helped me remember to listen to my body in those moments. The story is of a Rabbi called Zusya. When facing death Rabbi Zusya said he was not worried that in the coming world they would ask him why he was not like Moses or Abraham or any of the other great leaders from our people’s stories. The only question he was worried he would have to answer was why he was not more like Zusya. He knew that he was not meant to be measured against the achievements or ways of being of these other people, that the only measure he would be held to was his own truth. And so he lived his life not trying to be like any of the heroes that he learned about, but trying only to be like he knew himself to be. He lived his life in harmony with what he understood to be his true nature.

For the last two days I have wanted to do nothing but sleep. More accurate would be to say that my body has insisted that I do nothing but sleep. My mind had all kinds of ideas of things I wanted to do - bike rides I wanted to take, essays I wanted to write. But my body knew that it needed rest, not only because of the energy that I have expended in this last week, but also because of the energy I am getting ready to expend. 

At first I tried to fight my body on this. I tried to get myself up and force myself to bike and write, and do other things that are understood to be “productive”. But when I tried there was a resounding discordance in my body. I could tell right away that I was not in harmony with a truth that my body knew.  

My body knew that I needed rest. It knew that I am about to enter a busy stretch. It knows the rhythms of my life, knows when a lot of energy is going to be needed, and knows that when there is an opportunity to get some rest, to store up some sleep, it is not going to let me miss that opportunity. It turns out that all those years ago I was right about my sleep patterns.