Ruach MeMalelah

Just like Me

I've spent a lot of my life looking out the window. It could just be a love of nature, a desire to know if the sun is shining, or a curiosity about what is going on outside - all of which could actually be the case with me. But I know the truth. It's because I can't stop wishing I was someone else. I look out the window as if I am looking out of my reality and into some unknown, but better existence. It's not anything specific. Yes, I do wish that I had more money; it would have been nice to successfully nurse my daughter, and for longer; I would like to be able to get pregnant without intervention... There are other things that I am unhappy about in my life, but none of them are what causes me to wish I wasn't me. It's somethimg more basic than that. It's just my "isness", as a Rabbi I know used to say. I feel two dimensional. I want to BE more.

It reminds me of this poem I wrote in high school:

I look out the window
Into the world
That imperfect world
And I feel like I'm looking
Into my heart
I close the shutters
And walk away.

(That's at least how I remember it, since I may have packed the journal where I wrote them all down.) I know there's something more IN THERE, but I keep ignoring it, and it's coming back to get me in so many ways. I need to be happy. I need to get happy.

Incidentally, I read a great, and somewhat related ma'amar in Sichos Mussar today. It's the first one in the sefer, actually on this week's parsha. He says, in a nutshell, that a student needs to have an eagerness for what he's learning. He has to WANT it - and to view it as new and exciting. In other words, a person can only be happy when he is seeking. Once he feels accomplished, he starts to get antsy. It's all "old". It's all been "done before". This is so true. The problem is that seeking is not enough. A person can't just be an aimless wonder. He has to be seeking in a specific direction, or else he is just lost. Lost, like me.

posted by SS @ 5:24 AM