Choosing Life

 I wrote the following in a sermon for Congregation Sha’ar Zahav in 1986:

“Choosing life, then, involves growing: intending to grow, seizing opportunities to grow, making changes, trying experiments, admitting defeat, and trying something else. I think God wants us to grow up: to become more and more mature, honest, compassionate, trustworthy, appreciative, courageous, creative, alive. … Spiritual growth is like traveling to a distant city. I can get there in many different ways: I can go by car, skateboard, taxi, train, plane, or hovercraft. And even if I go slowly, or take a detour, I will still get there sooner or later. … As long as I’m trying to grow up, and trying to make choices that affirm and enhance my life and the lives of those around me, that’s enough.”

These are challenging times. Warfare, gun violence, and people’s apparent appetite for authoritarianism are reasons for outrage and despair. I waver between anger and depression. If a teeny wisp of hope breaks through, I try to comfort myself and my friends. Then I might try to change some small piece of the horror in a better direction. I’m mostly still at the ‘trying to comfort’ stage of response, with the occasional gentle donation, retweet, or share to express whichever emotion is topmost.

Noom encourages its members to view failures as feedback, information about what doesn’t work that may help suggest different approaches. They also recommend replacing thought such as “I can’t do X” with a less absolute and more optimistic “I haven’t been able to do X yet.” With the unstated hope that I can learn how to get myself to do X sometime, or that I can find a variation of X that I can do that will work well enough.

I tell myself over and over again that viewing anything less than perfect success as abject failure creates a false binary. There is a vast range of possibilities between perfect adherence to some shining standard of perfection and not making any changes at all. That’s when I sometimes remember my sermon about life as growth. As long as I’m trying to mosey in the direction of improvement, I am enough.