In Judaism, it's traditional practice to attach a small ornamented fixture to each doorframe, a mezuzah, inside of which is a scroll handwritten by a scribe who's dedicated themselves to their craft.One reason for this, among others, is to mark out transition places, the thresholds between one space and another, with a call to remember. You can see people touching them as they walk past, honouring this and reminding themselves - remembering - their deepest commitments.Mostly we don't give thresholds the attention they're due. How often we sleepwalk from activity to activity, meeting to meeting, work to home, taking what hooked us or preoccupied us from one place to to the next, reacting to each situation from the frustrations of the last. It's as if, for many of us, we're never quite here in what we do and neither fully in contact with the people we encounter. And we miss the opportunity to use the liminal spaces - the transitions between one place and another - to return to ourselves and to what we most care about.Thesholds - in space and in time - are sacred places in the way that they invite us to pause on the brink, before moving on. They call on us remember ourselves, to drop our preconceptions, judgements and our self-absorption so we can fully meet the situation that awaits. They call on us to be open and impressionable, ready to encounter something new.Approached in this manner, thresholds are an opportunity to wake up to this situation, to these people, to stop rushing all the time so we can be in it all afresh, present and responsive to whatever's coming.When you walk into your house at the end of a long day, can you pause in this way to mark the magnitude of the transition from one world to another that you are about to make? Then you can meet the people waiting there for you with your own genuine face, and with your love for them, and they in turn can meet you with theirs.
Photo by Brennan Ehrhardt on Unsplash
Could it be that we're so harried, so unhappy, so stressed because we've forgotten the simple pleasure and discipline of being up to one thing at a time?When we're committed to being always on, always connected, always responsive - and to reacting to every email, phone call, tweet, facebook posting, news report - how can we expect to lose ourselves, completely, in something that's both fulfilling and of value?Everything is interrupting everything else, all the time. And we keep it this way because we think we like it. It makes us feel important.And perhaps most significantly, it saves us from having to feel, really feel, anything in particular - numbing both our anxiety and our joy.
Our primary needs as human beings:Warmth, shelter, food.and then:Touch. The loving gaze of others.Being welcomed by smiling faces, simply for being alive.Community.A way to express our feelings and experiences truthfully, and to be heard.People with whom to celebrate, and with whom to grieve.Intimacy with others, and with the world.Nature.A way to belong.Being of service.Art.Beauty, wonder.Encounters with the sacredness of things.It is the nature of our primary needs that, when met, we feel filled, complete, connected. Nothing more is called for.The consumer economy in which we live is dedicated to meeting secondary needs - which are a pale imitation of what is primary. Our secondary needs, even when met, can't fill us. They leave us wanting more. And as such they are ripe for the sale, for the making of profit.So it should be no wonder that our primary needs are marginalised, often ridiculed, in our education system, organisations, and politics. Why have real contact with others when there's no money in it? Beauty, when it will satiate rather then create demand? Intimacy, when it interrupts our addiction to the latest products? Deep joy, or deep sorrow, and contact with what's sacred, when it stops us from feeling like empty vessels that need continual filling? Why do anything if it can't be linked to productivity, or profit, or economic growth? Why do anything that will have us stop our restless, rootless consumption?You could say that it's the systematic marginalisation of our primary needs, and the worship of the secondary, that keeps our whole economy going in its current form.But it's in meeting one another's primary needs, needs that can never be met in the form of a transaction, that we are most fulfilled, and most able to take care of what really needs our care.
Even when we see that our endless busyness is stifling us, holding back our creativity and contribution, narrowing us - even when we see that in many ways it's killing us - it's so hard for us to give it up.Why is this?It may be in part that we're unwilling to stand out from those around us - to risk the feelings of shame and awkwardness that come from taking a stand that we call our own.And it may well be that we're unwilling to cease our busyness as long we're unwilling to face loss. Because to give up rushing will indeed be to lose a particular identity, a way of keeping our self-esteem going, and of course the end of all those activities with which we stuff our time. And we human beings can have a hard time with loss.It's only through turning towards inevitable loss that we open the chance for life to reach us.I think we ought to do that sooner rather than later. Because loss will be forced on us in the end in any case. And by the time it comes there's a real possibility that we've missed our lives because we weren't willing to choose to face it earlier, of our own accord.
Friday night. The start of shabbat, the Jewish sabbath.A time to put down everything - work, concerns about work, busyness - for a day of renewal, relationship, paying attention to the world through new eyes.And yet here, sitting in the synagogue with my family, my body and mind are filled with the long list of tasks left open, opportunities not taken, calls not returned, emails not answered. There's tension in my chest and stomach at all that is unfinished, all that is mine to do. My mind, barely attentive to what's going on around me, reaches out in a wide, scattered, urgent arc - as if thinking it through over and again will resolve my difficulty. As if this is a way to complete what is uncompleted.And then I remember that the day will come, and none of us knows how soon, when I will no longer be able to complete anything. And on that day too, the day that life is done, there will still be a long list of incomplete projects. Messages waiting. Conversations unfinished. Responsibilities unfulfilled.I come to see that project I've taken up with my racing mind and thumping heart, the project of having it all neatly done, can never and will never be concluded. I am reminded that to be human is to live, in one way or another, as yet unwritten.That it is time to let go.Yes, there's a time for urgently finishing whatever is at hand. And a time, a time we need, to set all that aside and to see the incompleteness of the world, and everyone, not as something that always needs fixing but as part of its strange, necessary and wonderful beauty.
We human beings are profoundly shaped by, and drawn out from ourselves, by the things that are around us. And the smartphones that most of us carry are purposefully designed with this in mind.It's no accident that we find ourselves checking and re-checking email, messages and social media, before we even know quite why. We're drawn in by the promise of a brief, welcome surge of expectation and hope. This is going to be the moment when we'll find out that everything is OK, or that we're wanted, or that we're loved. This is the moment that we'll be saved from our anxiety.But shortly afterwards, we feel a familiar hollowness and emptiness. The hit was but for a moment. Our devices call to us, wink at us, and buzz us with the promise. And we willingly succumb, knowing it will not satisfy us but feeling unsure about whether we can do anything about it.We have, as Seth Godin writes, a 
The way we go about our work, the way we manage others, the way we lead and the way we follow can so easily be an attempt to get seen in a particular light.We often can't tell how hard we're trying to have it be this way - how our late nights are an effort to be seen as diligent, how our saying 'yes' to everything is a project to be seen as caring, how our perfectionism is an attempt to be seen as perfect, how our desperation for promotion is an attempt to be seen as valuable. And we rarely see how our moods and bodies are part of our efforting - the crashing disappointment when someone dislikes the presentation we've slaved over for a week, the deflation when another person doesn't give us just the right kind of praise (just the right length, just the right temperature), the momentary flash of delight at a bonus.When we work from this grabbing, needy place - and in particular when we lead or manage others from here - we're not responding to the world so much as trying to fill a hole in ourselves that we don't know how to fill. And there are many problems with this. It's an endless project, doomed to remain unfinished, and to draw from us ever more energy and attention. No amount of praise of the right kind will do it, and no amount of being seen as being perfect will resolve the feeling that something is missing - because there is always the next moment, and the next, and the next when it can all fall apart. And it turns us away from others and from what's called for as it calls us towards our own neediness.The route through is not to find a way to fill the emptiness or to give up our longing for love or perfection, but to learn that the hole never really needed filling - to open our hand and find it already full. It is truly a lifetime's work to discover that everything we need is right here - that we are already perfect, and already love, simply by being alive. And the discovery that nothing needs to be done, paradoxically, frees us up to stop grasping and instead do exactly what is most called for.
Three basic human fears about what we do:
Sometimes, in the midst of our busyness and our fixation on having things work out just the way we want them, we forget that we’re alive.This forgetfulness, it seems to me, is an inevitable part of our human condition. I like very much Martin Heidegger’s phrase for this – that we get ‘scattered into everydayness’. In our everyday coping with all that comes our way, we go to sleep to ourselves and what we’re really up to in our lives.When our forgetfulness goes on for too long, and if we don’t take steps to remember our aliveness, it starts to colour everything we’re doing. Workplaces in which people have forgotten they’re alive become places that pursue profit or targets with no sense of what they’re for. Families who have forgotten they’re alive lose sight of the preciousness and sacredness of the relationships between their members. There is always the washing-up to do, of course, but it can be a humdrum task to be endured or, when we’re awake to what being in a family is for, an expression of a much bigger commitment to the care of one another and the life that we share.All of this is why it is vital that we have practices for remembering ourselves – practices that connect us to one another, to our aliveness, and to our relationship with all of life. Many of us have no such practices and those that we do have to deal with our scatteredness serve to numb us rather than bring us more fully to life.One of the reasons this is difficult for many of us is that as we’ve pursued individualism we’ve abandoned so many of the shared rituals that come from being part of community: singing together; retelling shared stories, especially the founding myths of our families or culture; eating together; turning towards one another in appreciation and recognition. And we’ve been sold the line that entertainment will do all of this for us, but it mostly can’t reach deeply enough into our lives or into the lives of the people around us to wake us up to ourselves.Writing is, for me, a powerful experience of self-remembering – a way in which I catch on to my aliveness. And that you are reading is part of it – though we may never have met we’re bound, you and I, for a moment. Reading – novels, poetry, philosophy, science. Walking too. Music. Meditation. Art. But nothing is as powerful a force for my own self-remembering as the web of Jewish practice that is woven through my life and which binds me in time, in place, and in a community. It has very little if anything to do with belief, and very much to do with what I’ve been talking about here – practices that remind me again and again of the feeling of being alive and connected to others in a vast universe of which I am, we are, a part.Please understand that I’m not making an argument here for anyone to take up the forms of self-remembering that I’ve found so life-giving. But I am arguing for taking self-remembering seriously – that discovering and taking up practices that bring us to life again and again is foundational to a life well lived and good work well done.Otherwise we’re just sleep-walking through.