Thought Knot

Such a strange mess of things going on in my head lately, all knotted into each other like some beginner's macramé project gone horribly wrong. I try to pull out one strand so that I can blog about it, but then it tangles up with the others and drags them along for the ride and whoops, I've got a big unattractive mess (a mess that really only ever aspired to be a plant hanger but now isn't really any good to anyone and has to be thrown out and started over).

So because I'm the impatient type, I'm just going to yank out a knotty chunk containing a few random topics I've been thinking about. I dare you to find any sort of reasonable connection.

Guilt, specifically survivor's guilt (or something closely related):
Overall, things are going pretty well right now in J-land. No major upsets, no crises, no nasty surprises, and things are definitely more on the positive than the negative side of the life-ledger. Sounds like a good thing, right? But strangely enough, I've been feeling awash in guilt lately. Maybe awash is not exactly right; it's more like I've been pregnant with guilt, a small ball of it at first that's been growing and growing in my gut somewhere. Not the straightforward "I feel bad/I done wrong" kind of guilt, but the more complicated "look how lucky I am, and why do I deserve this any more than anyone else" kind. Survivor's guilt, or something closely related. I'm not sure if this is because of my recent cancer diagnosis anniversary, or because I've just recently found myself the recipient of several really gruesome stories (all fortunately far removed from me personally, and I won't detail them here) of the horrible-things-happening-to-good-people variety. During my most superstitious/paranoid navel-gazing moments (I don't have them often, but I do have them) I keep wondering if I'm being given warnings from the Universe or something. I'm acutely aware of my blessings, but feeling like if I enjoy them too much the other shoe might drop and it'll be my turn for the horrible things. Why I can't just straight up enjoy the good things while I have them is beyond me…is this part of the complexity of adulthood? The danger of too much introspection? An unavoidable bequest of my Jewish heritage? I really don't know. But it's been bugging me enough lately that I felt like mentioning it. Maybe by mentioning it I can exorcise it (there goes that superstition again).

Everyone Does Something Different and Together We Are a Beautiful Ecosystem:
Lately I have been boggled (in a good way) by the sheer overwhelming number and variety of types of things that we grownup, wage-earning humans do with our days. (You can insert a standard caveat here about "we" = people in industrialized, capitalist countries, and that unpaid work is equally valid to paid work, etc.) It fascinates me that we have evolved such complex social organisms that encourage so many different specialized niches (and so many more of them with each generation…I mean, even our grandparents' world was simpler). And I am grateful that each of us can choose (at least to some extent) to do something we enjoy/are good at from such a wide variety of different activities, and that we can narrowly specialize and concentrate on knowing a lot about a little rather than being forced by circumstance to know a little about a lot. That being said, I'm also amazed at the ways in which many (if not most) of us just sort of fall into doing the job that we're doing, without necessarily meaning to specialize in it at all. I mean, who chooses to be a garbage collector? Does anyone really start out thinking "hey, I want to be an economist!" I keep thinking about Nature vs. nurture as applied to work…how many of us are doing what we do because it is our inherent talent/ability/calling, and how many of us because of where/how/by whom we are raised? It's a wildly complex world we live in, and I'm constantly marveling at how we all seem to eventually find our place in it (even if that place is constantly changing, or isn't really our ideal).

Angels:
The concept of angels keeps coming up in Torah study (um, have I mentioned that Josh and I have been taking turns going to a Saturday morning Torah study class at the synagogue a few months ago?), and I'm still just generally confused by and skeptical of the concept. I always thought of angels as mostly a Christian thing, but they're clearly there in the Torah. But what are they? They're not God, and they're not humans. They're not like anything else of this earth. Divine messengers? But why? God seems perfectly able to talk directly to humans, or to take action through/with/on behalf of humans. What's the point of angels? What do they do? For some reason I find angels a harder concept to swallow than God. Isn't that strange? And if we're going to talk about angels, do we need also to talk about devils/demons? How about THE devil? Or Heaven and Hell? I thought those were mostly Christian concepts too, but clearly I haven't put too much time into figuring out what Jews (or what *I*) believe about all these things. I'm going to have to see if I can get a minute to ask the Rabbi one of these days…you know, purely for research purposes.

Ok, that's it for now…maybe I'll pull out another chunk next time, maybe I'll just do one at a time. Maybe I'll just go back to regular life-reporting. We'll see.