Taking Stock

 September 22, 2012

These are the Days of Awe. From now until Yom Kippur on September 26, the Book of Life is open, and I am asking G-d to inscribe my name in it, so that I may have a good year.

I am neither a religious nor an observant Jew. But I cherish these High Holy Days because they give me a context for stopping and looking hard at myself, the world around me and my place in it.

When I was a child, these holidays were all about missing school, eating big meals and dipping challah in sugar (for a sweet year). But ritual, like education, is wasted on the young.

Now I appreciate that these 10 days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are for taking stock: thanking G-d for the past year’s blessings, offering contrition for wrongs I have done, promising to turn myself around and into a more generous, patient and giving person, praying for blessings in the year to come.

Taking stock is one of the most rewarding parts of getting older: being able to look back far enough to put some meaningful perspective in life. Here in my mid-50s, I am in the catbird seat: I revisit the past in decades—my 20s, 30s and so on—and I see a lot of scrambling, struggling and self-absorption. Life was a constant hunt: for love, for meaningful work, for a thinner body and for success, however I defined it. I was lonely a lot. And, I was flailing, assigning value to things and people outside myself—professional accomplishments, weight loss, lovers—convinced they would deliver happiness, all the while blindsided by—often drowning in—my own personal drama.

Then, when I was 33, a car hit me and, unable to walk until my fractured pelvis and low back healed, I was confined to my two-room, third-floor New York City walk-up, where I spent the next month learning to live with myself.

Talk about blessings in disguise.

I’d like to say that my psychological, spiritual and moral evolution has been steady since then, but self-absorption is a hard habit to break, especially when the challenges of living feel insurmountable: Work crushes my spirit, romance sputters, self-doubt envelops me, all shoving me toward the center of my own narrow universe, narcissistic and needy. This does not make me proud; it is not the kind of example I want to set for my children.

It is time to focus on people and things other than myself, not for the sake of distraction, but for perspective: Suffering is relative. There are always those whose struggles are greater.

This is how age and these Days of Awe have me thinking. Self-preoccupation is not enriching; it is a vise, constricting and, ultimately, isolating. 

I am still searching, but for a different kind meaning: one borne of deeper engagement in the world and a fuller awareness of the small contributions I can make. Praying for an inscription in the Book of Life is not enough. I must be worthy of it.