Oh What A Day

Fun fact: More people in the world don't blog than do.

I was away for Shabbos, thought going that there was a good chance I'd be going to a concert and then home last night, but it wasn't to be.

I took a ride home at 9ish this morning, post minyan. Had a nice chat with the fellows in the car heading to Y.U. We spoke about how there was a time when you had to get up to change the channel, Carl Rodgers' positive approach, The Gloria Tapes, how HAL in 2001, A Space Odyssey is one letter in the alphabet after IBM, and much much more.

Got to my neighborhood at 10ish and treated myself to egg whites on a whole wheat bagel at the restaurant formerly known as Grandma's Cookies. My health and eating have been very much on my mind lately. Last week I lost 4 pounds and the weigher-in-ner at Weight Watcher announced the number to me with great excitement. I'd rather they just hand me the number stamped in the book as quickly as possible and say as little as possible, because when it goes up they tend to be quite inappropriate at worst and awkward at best.

At 10:30ish I met my friends and their four (hope I didn't forget one) kids. My friend told me a lovely story, as we stood over the children's books. Rabbi Baruch Chait was talking with my friend's young son about his idea to have a robot in his book and asked him what he thought a good name for it would be. The boy came up with the name that Rabbi Chait used. In the book he replicated the conversation they had as a conversation between an older rabbi and a kid. In real life Rabbi Chait gave a large poster size, illustrated copy of that page of the book to the boy.

Then I took an hour and a half walk, which included going back and forth over the GW bridge. Then I ate some garlic chicken and brown rice. My computer guy came by and was helpful as always. A friend called me with a job offer. Another friend emailed me with his positive review of the film I recommended he watch (The Little Traitor). That brings us pretty much up to now.

While walking over the bridge I came up with this:

Bridges and tunnels
Choose: to build or to burrow
Get by that ocean

and this:

Life's a narrow bridge,
whether you drive, walk, bike, run
It is what it is

I had an out of the box thought today - "Hakin'ah vehata'avah vehakavod motzi'in et ha'adam min ha'olam" - "The traits of jealousy, desire, and honor remove a person from this world." I always thought - what I think is the conventional interpretation - that this means that these things take you out of true reality. Here's my new idea:

To be religious, spiritual, and holy you need to work with the human traits of being jealous, desirous, seeking the limelight. You need to wrestle with these inclinations, use them, fight them, balance them. They are tools and, if you deal with them in the right way as they come along in your life, can be the ticket that takes you out of this world... and will cause you to enter the next.