Twilight. A red plane flies between our old apartment building and the next. In it sat a blonde little girl. With bangs. She smiled at me. When I awoke, I told her father I was pregnant. We have another daughter. Sixteen weeks later. System scan at the best of the best. I already have experience with him with girls, and I wait patiently to hear him tell me with medical humor that “there is a small genetic defect that will pass around the age of 16, the hymen”. Instead, I hear: “No worries, he won’t have anything to be embarrassed about, you have a son.” “No….”, I say, “Professor, please look again, I saw a girl”. He smiled and pointed to a spot on the grey screen. Before the wonders of 3D. I couldn’t really tell, so I believed him. Guli was born. Little man. Blonde. Bringing with him endless kindness and boundless quantities of joy and mischief.
Dusk. On the moshav. Cooking Friday dinner. The soft light of the setting sun comes in through the windows. Bliss. My man, beside me, is reading a newspaper. Out of the corner of my eye I spy something brown on the floor. An alarm goes off in my head. I scream: “Cockroach!”. My man jumps up to help. He is tall and strong, the weekend section of the paper is rolled up in his hand and he hits the roach with it. The alarm fades. Only then do I notice four children holding themselves in laughter at the kitchen door. Only then the two of us realize the cockroach isn’t a real cockroach. It’s plastic. One of Guli’s toys. He thought it would be very entertaining. We all laughed. He was right.
Justice. I always say, it feels like justice. An intuitive feeling that says “this is the right thing to do”. The feeling always comes first. Afterwards we begin to think, and may come to other conclusions. The righteous (the executors of justice) are those who act according to the Aristotelian principle of “the middle road”*. Because it is easy to be wrong and to think the middle road is a compromise, I jump up and clarify that it isn’t. The middle road is the accommodation between the act and the objective. Between stimulus and response. An ethical person will choose to express a response that is accurate for the situation. Situations with negligible ethical questions will trigger responses of indifference; in cases where essential, ethical questions are raised, they will trigger strong feelings like anger, sorrow, frustration or joy, hope, happiness. It’s all relative. Sound simple? Perhaps, on condition that we can see the situation as it is.
Sight. An action of collecting information through light. In complete darkness, we cannot see a thing. No objects, no colors, no textures. In full light, it is generally easier. Of course, in our complex reality, there are many components that will either challenge or facilitate sight. They’ll be the subject of another blog. The most challenging hours of the day for sight are the blue hours, when light changes from day to night or vice versa. Dusk, but not yet completely dark. Dawn, but not yet bright. An unending variety of greys. Everything is indistinct.
Greys. In 2010, I performed an experiment on myself. I said to myself, it can’t possibly be that most people are satisfied in their greyness of life, and only you make a fuss anytime you’re not really happy. Get over it and learn to live in the greys. And that’s how it was for a while. At the lowest point, I took my grey life to a grey, European city for a few days. I had enough of grey company. In January, 2011, the revolution was ready to begin. Grey isn’t the life for me and I’m willing to pay the price. There’s always a price. But I want to see. I want to be able to be accurate in my response. To choose.
Expected. Everything is expected and permission is granted. Rabbi Akiva said it and for years I didn’t understand. One day it hit me, neither theologically nor philosophically solely an understanding that is the result of observing the series of experiences that make up my life experience up to now. In schematic simplicity:
A person is born at point A and leaves her physical body at point B. Two defined and expected points. From here on, everything is expected. Between A and B there is one straight line and an endless number of offshoots. Who determines the path? We do. Our countless daily choices are what is created while moving down the path of our lives. Passive or active choices. Groundbreaking choices or minor things. The beauty is that at any moment we can calculate a new route. Turn from the road to a dirt path or a highway. Experience ups, downs, plateaus. We have the infinite right to choose until we get to B.
Mists. The difficulty lies in the fact that the road is full of mists and fog. Very grey. We can’t really see where we’re going, which way we’re turning. Sometimes it’s so daunting that we stick to what we know. We choose a feeling of virtual certainty. And then one Friday evening, around dusk. A woman disturbs the silence with screams, a big, strong man energetically hits a plastic toy, and four children laugh. Because the king is so naked. Naked and blind. Cannot differentiate between reality and imagination.
You are righteous, if you have arrived at this point, all of you. What do we do? Forge a new path. The chosen destination – “good“. We choose good. Even in the mists, when we’re not exactly sure which road leads there. What is good and what is bad. There is always the freedom for good intentions**. To better discern reality. For more accurate choices. Appropriate for the given situation. You feel good, even if it isn’t clear why. You overcome sight limitations with an educated use of all the tools in the box. If the emotional world is not happy inside. If the mind is wavering and jumpy. If fears take over. There are tools. You can combine all the components in harmony. Understand. And from this understanding find bliss. Quiet. Because in this life there is no better goal to achieve.
