Queens Jewish Link
Connecting the Queens Jewish Community Do you allow yourself to be psychologically vulnerable? Does she know the ways you are scared or...
Do you have a basic assumption that no respectable person would admit to being lonely? Truth be told, a high degree of loneliness is an unforgiving part of simply being human. It appears to be a built-in feature.
Usually, I have two or three columns ready ahead of time, and I send them in as the weeks pass. I write when a topic/idea comes to me or when I’m in the mood. This way, I’m never left with a deadline in two hours and nothing to hand in. And yes, I was the girl in grad school who handed in her term papers a week early. I completed them; who knows if my printer would conk out next week or the file would accidentally be erased. I wanted the term paper turned in, so I didn’t have to worry about it anymore. I mention this now because I am breaking into my collections of yet to be published articles to publish this one as it deals with Chanukah and Chanukah is still somewhat fresh in our minds.
Do you tend to blame yourself instead of those who did you wrong? You know that to make a mistake is human. To blame it on someone else – that’s even more human. You know what they say: Husbands and wives can be annoying; but without them, who would we blame for misplacing our socks? They also say: The best way to get most husbands to do something is to suggest that perhaps they’re too old to do it.
Is your life going the way you planned? Have you achieved your well-defined goals? Hmmm. Sometimes life has other plans for us. Mistakes, illness, or some other event can derail us entirely. We realize that our hopeful plan cannot come to fruition. Did you ever make Plan B or C? Something unexpected will inevitably come along in our lives, yet we wonder how things ended up this way.
We may have come to believe that our loved ones should be the center of our lives. We long to mean everything to them, do we not? But can you truly meet all of her needs all of the time? Do you feel like you complete him or that you even should?
We have all been exposed to a catastrophic, cataclysmic event. Some of us are just wandering in the world knowing that it has become a frightening, fearful place. We may not even have a clue as to what we should do or what, if anything, can help.
