This Simple Math
It’s just after 6:00am and the sunroom is slightly chilly as I settle into my chair. Today calls for a blanket over my lap, the first sips of coffee warming my insides. A pang of awareness pings my brain that I can enjoy this elixir; a few weeks ago it was not agreeing with my nervous system, and then there’s the miraculous fact of functioning taste buds, the kind of miracle, perhaps like most miracles, you tend not to notice unless it’s gone. The twinkle lights in the den reflect in the floor-to-ceiling glass sliders, and I feel held here. Sky shows in weak, watery patches in the spaces between tree branches, still black-looking in the early light.
My spouse’s alarm sounded at 5:00am, but I was already awake, a hand on my belly, breathing in the quiet. After the night, before the day. When it comes to cycles of day and night, it’s not difficult to recognize liminal spaces, those subtle connectors from one more overt state to another: Light, dark; sun, moon.
The pairings bring comfort, for it is their rhythms that rock us to sleep and caress our cheek in the morning. We count on their alternating presence to know – quite literally – what time it is.
But what about the less obvious passages? How do we identify those and our place in them? My thoughts drift to life cycle events; there is a reason, after all, that Judaism and other world religions have traditions for observing and honoring birth, naming, marriage, divorce, monthly cycles, miscarriage, pregnancy, illness, healing, and death – among others. For every one of these, a ritual or blessing exists, some form of acknowledging that there is a before and there is an after.
In saying these words and partaking of these rituals, we step into something bigger than our own seemingly random life experiences, so often unseen by others and even by ourselves. We are given a mechanism, a technology, if you will, for saying something has happened here, and in some big or small way, nothing will ever be the same, and we will bless it as part of a bigger whole, the whole not only of your life but of your life as an expression and embodiment of creation. In this way, no matter what the “event” is – a joyful first, a grievous ending, or something less dramatic and more cyclical in nature – we might come to see everything as beaded into a vast and intricate net.
This honoring is brilliant if you think about it, how at once it seems to say: your experience matters and bears honoring, and your experience is but a moment in infinite creation, never beginning and never ending. Perhaps most importantly, you are not the first, you will not be the last, and you are not alone.
I pause and look up to see the grass is now discernibly green, individual tree trunks decipherable as the light increases. Sunday, in Jewish time, is also called yom ha’rishon, the first day. It is when the week begins anew and thus, we return to the work of things after Shabbat. (The crows don’t know this of course, nor the squirrels whose unceasing industry is a full-time gig as they prepare to survive another winter.)
The refrain of the song we sing at the end of Shabbat floats through my mind – shavua tov, a good week – and I consider how there is purpose in noting this name, day one. A new week. Time shifts again and again and carries us inexorably forward.
No matter what changes I’m going through, no matter what between season I may be in as I straddle years of family-centered life and the unknown expanse of decades, should I be so blessed, ahead, no matter my questions and curiosities, no matter how my hair is greyer by the day and I wake at 4:00am in a sweat most mornings, no matter living on a planet in perilous condition and amidst an urgent, high stakes human and political climate, there is this simple and profound way of tracking time. Day One, every single week, says, “begin again.”
Work, create, engage, show up, serve, give, solve, inquire, receive, exchange, do your best to be the truest version of yourself you can access in any given moment, and then – rest. Let it all go. Exhale. Release. Pause, pray, and take a full 24-hour cycle to take stock of what is with renewed awareness and gratitude before starting all over again.
Week after week, the light will change, colors will change, soon fewer and fewer leaves will maintain their hold to the trees, calling themselves home. The first day will keep coming, and you might keep wondering about liminal space, you might keep asking what time it is in your own life. But this seven day cycle will keep you from getting lost in the outer galaxies of thought. You do not have to name everything or even understand it.
You only need to stay rooted in this simple math: Day one, day two, and so on. For other moments, rituals and blessings exist, and you will know when it is time to turn to them. Perhaps everything else really is between, and it is here that each new day starts and then ends, exhorting us not to miss it.