Good Advice

These past couple of weeks I have been feeling somewhat frazzled. You may have gathered that from my last post. A combination of turning 26, hitting the mid-way part of my year of study at Pardes, and being the dead of winter, has seemed to stir up a cocktail of confusion, and mild panic. I was in the desert on a school trip for 3 days last week. Each time I leave Jerusalem I seem to gain a bit more clarity---and yes I will be doing it more often! I have narrowed down a lot of my choices in life and have given a lot of thought and consideration to staying here in Jerusalem for a second year. I am waiting to hear back about a possible job option and if that works out I think I am going to stay. I know that I wrote that I wanted to make a commitment of 5 years to the next place I call 'home' but I am going to take a loophole out by saying that if I stay in Jerusalem its not really the 'next' place. Life just seems to move a bit slower here. A friend commented the other day how there is something to living your life surrounded by people who are in touch with themselves. Almost everyone here is living opposed to just getting by.

Still in the process of coming down from my height of stressed out confusion I got three independent voices of wisdom from various friends that I would like to share with you.

1. "Sometimes things just aren't worth thinking that hard about."

2. "I guess that is what life is all about: change and adjustment. If we aren't changing we aren't really existing."

3. Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to
love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books
written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers,
which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to
live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions
now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually,
without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.--Rainer
Maria Rilke, from "Letters to a Young Poet"