It all came back to me. Reading my journals from ten years ago, I remember how painfully stuck I was in my inner turmoils. Every day, for several years, my entry was almost identical. First, the confessions. I …
Where the heart is willing, it will find a thousand ways. Where it is unwilling, it will find a thousand excuses. – Arlen Price If your past still plagues you, it will show in stressful relationships, squashed dreams, …
“Love is what we are born with. Fear is what we learn. The spiritual journey is the unlearning of fear and prejudices and the acceptance of love back in our hearts. Love is the essential reality and our …
My world was changing in every sense of the phrase. At the age of 12, I was moving from the Ukraine to Canada. I was leaving all of my friends and family as well as everything that I had known since the day I was born. I was going to be alone, an outsider; I was going to be the immigrant in all of my classes. If the life changes experienced through adolescence weren’t grueling enough, now, I had to cope with moving to an entirely foreign place with nothing but my parents and a suitcase.
I had an incredibly difficult time adapting to my new environment and my new life. I was immersed in a culture completely unknown to me. It wasn’t easy making new friends; especially when your first languages differ from one another. I yearned for the company of my friends and extended family back home.
I was down and anxious. It was only a few months after our move when I started feeling like a shell of my former self. I had never experienced anything like this. I had no appetite and no energy. I was in a dark space devoid of life. Lethargy met me at every turn. I was circling the drain. The best I could do was to get my kids off to school and climb back into bed.
After a few weeks, I began to wonder what was going on. Being an independent stubborn person, I decided to ride it out on my own. In retrospect, this was probably not the right way to go.
Have you ever seen a Chinese Finger Puzzle? They’re those little tubes of interwoven paper that look harmless enough. Usually, the gig goes like this:
Your friend hands you the Chinese Finger Puzzle and instructs you to insert your index fingers into each end. So you do. Next, with a mischievous grin, your friend tells you to take your fingers out of the tube. Puzzled (pun intended) as to why this might be so hard, you try to pull your fingers out.
But you can’t. The tube has tightened around your fingers.
Twelve years ago I had a breakdown. My mother died, I lost eight friends/relatives in one year, my kids were struck by lightning in a parasailing accident, and my dad was dying of bone cancer.
Shattered dreams, unmet expectations, and loss can certainly cause us to lose heart. If you’ve ever been there, if your heart has ever been shattered and your recollection of the pain is still fresh, you know what I’m talking about.
In the past few years I have made some drastic changes in my life. After 20 years of working as a senior economist at the Central Bank of Israel, I decided to move into the field of art. I make large statues from wood and bronze, and modern art works on big industrial iron plates. Two years ago I decided to write a book, which I named Secrets of Kindness: A Journey Among Good People. The book is a collection of stories about people who help others.
Why did I do this? Why did I leave a safe and steady career to pursue the uncertain calling of art and writing?
We all have our crosses to bear. We can all recall times in our lives when we were in dire places. Maybe we had a mental illness, maybe we were in a bad relationship, maybe we were in debt or maybe we just made a lot of unfortunate decisions that got us into big trouble.
And as we’re human beings, we beat ourselves up over it. We get stuck in a pattern of trying to figure out why we did what we did, why we were so stupid, so dumb or so naive.
