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To Everything There is a Season – Or is There?

I have always been a frazzled mom. Before I became a mom, I had grand plans of being one of those parents who always has it together, who can handle anything that gets thrown their way, and who does it all with such effortlessly cool, collected, calm, that other parents beg for the recipe to their secret sauce.

Well, here’s the thing – that just did not happen for me. Parenthood, for me, has always been more of a juggling act than anything else; one where I see how many balls I can toss into the air before one of them inevitably gets dropped. Because being a parent is hard. And as most parents will tell you, its all about juggling – and sometimes you’re better at catching the next new thing that’s thrown your way, and sometimes you’re just not.

When Robbie, my now four-year-old, was a few months old, we began introducing solid foods. We started with rice cereal, progressed to oatmeal, and then we moved onto purees. I remember standing in the aisle at the grocery store, utterly panicked as I looked at shelf after shelf of baby food. What was I supposed to start with? Was it peas or carrots? If I introduced fruits too early, would I have a sugar addict for a baby? What was the difference between a Step 1 Food and a Step 2 Food? Did I need organic or was regular Gerber going to be ok?

I was sleep deprived and overwhelmed, and more than anything, I really just didn’t want to get it wrong. For whatever reason, that decision, in that particular moment in time, felt really important. So there I was standing in the baby aisle, spending entirely too long thinking about the merits of watery vegetables, and I finally make a decision and start putting food into my cart when someone walks down the aisle, takes one look at my basket, and says “you know, if you really love your baby, you won’t feed him that garbage; you’ll make your own baby food.”

Well, I just lost it. I left my cart in the aisle (apologies to the Baker’s employee who had to put everything back) and I got into my car, the guilt gnawing away at my already-fragile new mommy heart.  

Because I loved my baby. And apparently that meant making sweet potato-apple-banana-squash purees. And that meant adding another ball to my already pretty precarious juggling act. 

The next morning, I came to Temple and I sat down in Cantor Alexander’s office and asked, “do you remember how to make baby food?” to which she replied something like, “uh yeah, I went to the grocery store and I bought some.” Needless to say, this conversation is only one of the many reasons that I am lucky to call Cantor my colleague and my dear friend.

Because in addition to being kind and compassionate and soothing my mom-guilt, and telling me that feeding my kid store bought baby food will not be the thing that determines his success in life, and that it’s certainly not how to measure my love for my child, she reminded me that we simply can’t do it all. And not doing it all doesn’t make me a good mom or a bad mom; it simply makes me human. 

And the truth is, the notion that we can’t do it all is one of the most common refrains we hear, and it’s also something that, I think, most of us fight against with every fiber of our being. Because we want to be everywhere, and we want to do everything. And so, we’re constantly fighting against the one thing that holds us back from doing everything that we want to do – and that is time. 

Time is both endless and it is also frustratingly finite. And it is the one thing that there is never enough of, regardless of what stage of life we find ourselves in. One moment we’re soaking up baby snuggles and committing the sounds of their first giggles to memory, and the next we’re sending them off to kindergarten. One day we’re graduating from college and then we blink, and we’re at our retirement parties. One moment we have our whole lives in front of us, the next we are nearing the end of our time on this earth, and still, it is never enough. 

Over the summer, I read a book by Oliver Burkeman that really challenged me to think critically about my understanding of time. In his book, he tells this story about how he asked his friends to “guess – off the top of their heads, without doing any mental arithmetic – how many weeks they thought the average person could expect to live.” 

One friend, he writes, “named a number in the six figures. Yet, as I felt obliged to inform her, a fairly modest six-figure number of weeks – 310,000—is the approximate duration of all human civilization since the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia…” 

It turns out, Burkeman writes, that “the average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short…. Assuming you live to be eighty, you’ll have about four thousand weeks.”  

Four thousand weeks – that’s it. Our lives are insignificant blips on the cosmic radar. It’s no wonder that we always feel like we’re in a race against time – because we are. And so, we’re left to grapple with what we do with “the outrageous brevity and shimmering possibilities of our four thousand weeks.” 

In the end, we’re left with a simple math equation – we have x number of things to do and y amount of time to do them in. But rather than acknowledge that we can’t do it all, most of us go to great lengths to avoid contemplating our own morbidity. In fact, most of us actually refuse to confront the brevity of our lives until we are forced to, either through circumstance or through days like today, when our liturgy compels us to wrestle with the harsh reality that between this Yom Kippur and next, “some of us will live and some will die, some by fire, some by water, some by sword, and some by beast.”  

But even then, even when we confront the stark reality of our cosmic insignificance head-on, most of us end up doing mental gymnastics to convince ourselves that if we can only find the right life-hack, the right time management system, or the right way to multi-task, that we will be able to squeeze more into what precious little time we have. 

So, we meal prep and we zero-out our inboxes every night and we figure out the perfect morning routines and we implement any number of cleaning hacks and tips and tricks to keep up with the mountains of dishes to wash and laundry to clean. But – spoiler alert – we still have to eat three times a day, emptying our inboxes at night does not actually stop them from filling up by the next morning, getting up earlier just means getting less sleep, and, I’m sad to report, the dishes and the laundry just piling up. 

Yet, we still keep hunting for that better, more time efficient solution. And we do it in service to the idea that if we can just get the stuff we don’t really want to do out of the way, then we can get to the important things. If we can just check everything off the list, then we’ll be able to do the things that we really want to do; the things that really matter.

In nearly every funeral that I do, I offer the words from Ecclesiastes, which tell us that:

For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven: 
A time to be born and a time to die.
A time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted.
A time to tear down and a time to build up. 
A time to weep and a time to laugh.
A time to grieve and a time to dance. 

And I share these words because I find tremendous comfort in the idea that our lives are ordered in such a way that we will experience all of these seasons, each in their own time. That there are, actually, times set aside for every purpose under heaven and that our lives are made meaningful and holy as we move amidst and between them.   

But if I’m being honest, I also struggle with this text. Because while I want to believe it, deep down, I do wonder – what if there’s not time for every experience under heaven? 

And as it turns out, I’m not the only person who’s wondered if Ecclesiastes got it wrong. Israeli poet, Yehudah Amichai wrote:
    A man doesn’t have time in his life
    to have time for everything. 
    He doesn’t have seasons enough to have 
    a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
    was wrong about that. 
    
A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
    to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
    with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
    to make love in war and war in love. 
    To hate and forgive and remember and forget,
    to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
    what history takes years and years to do. 

Ecclesiastes got it wrong, Amichai says. There is not time enough to have time for everything. We have to experience everything, all at the same time, or we risk not having that experience or that season at all.  Because if we wait to build up until we are finished tearing down, we will never build. And if we wait to dance until we finish grieving, we will never dance. 

And the same is true with our endless to-do lists. We cannot and we will not do it all. In fact, it’s actually irrational to feel like we could or should do more in the same twenty-four hour a day period, despite what society and our own “tyrannical inner voices” try to tell us. “But,” Oliver Burkeman writes, “we rarely stop to consider things so rationally, though, because that would mean confronting the painful truth of our limitations. We would be forced to acknowledge that there are hard choices to be made: which balls to let drop, which people to disappoint, which cherished ambitions to abandon, which roles to fail at. Maybe you can’t keep your current job while also seeing enough of your children;” Burkeman suggests. “Maybe making sufficient time in the week for your creative calling means you’ll never have an especially tidy home, or get quite as much exercise as you should, and so on. Instead, in an attempt to avoid these unpleasant truths, we deploy the strategy that dominates most conventional advice on how to deal with busyness: we tell ourselves we’ll just have to find a way to do more – to try to address our busyness, you could say, by making ourselves busier still.” 

The notion that we can do it all is a false narrative, and it’s fundamentally flawed, because there is not time enough in our lives to have time for everything. It’s not because we didn’t work hard enough or that we weren’t committed or creative or capable enough – the simple truth is that there are limitations to what we can do. And that is simultaneously paralyzing and also profoundly freeing. 

Because when we say “yes” to something, we are, in essence, saying “no” to something else. And we can either do that by abdicating responsibility and allowing someone else’s agenda to take precedence over our own, or by intentionally taking ownership of our own lives and embracing our limitations. 

Traditionally on Yom Kippur, we read from Parshat Nitzavim in Deuteronomy, which reminds us that our choices matter and that they have consequences. God speaks to the Israelite people and says, “I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life so that you and your offspring will live.” 

Choose life, God says. And the choice is not whether or not to live – it’s about how to live. It’s about choosing the kind of lives we want to have, which means embracing and even celebrating our limitations. 

At the end of the day, we get to choose. But as Ecclesiastes says, life is fleeting and it is as ephemeral as the air we breathe, and so whatever we choose to do, however we choose to live out our four thousand precious weeks, we should “do whatever is in our power to do, and do it with all of our might.” 

So, cook dinner or get takeout. Make sure your home is spotless or make blanket forts on every surface of your family room. Go out with friends or stay home and do nothing at all. Spend your money or save it. But whatever you do, Ecclesiastes says, do it on purpose.  

When I got home the night after my baby food debacle, I pulled out a jar of pre-made store-bought baby food for Robbie. Because for me, loving my baby actually just meant making sure that he got fed. And that I got to be the one to feed him. And for me, the time that I spent choo-choo-training those green beans into his mouth was a far more significant measure of my love than making the puree from scratch would have ever been. 

As a rabbi, I have the very great privilege of sitting with people in their final days of life as they contemplate what it will mean to leave this world. And regardless of their circumstance – regardless of whether I’m holding the hand of a young person whose life will be cut tragically short, or I’m sitting with a great-grandparent at the end of a very full and beautiful life – the sentiment is always the same: there wasn’t enough time. 

So do what you love with the people you love most. Practice saying “no” more often even when it’s hard, and especially when it means saying “no” to something that, at the end of your four thousand weeks, won’t actually matter. Because, when you really think about it, holiness comes from the very thing that we fight so fiercely against – our limitations. The very act of making a choice means intentionally sacrificing everything else in order to pursue that which will bring us greater joy and deeper meaning. 

As we enter our new year, we stand on the precipice of an opportunity to create profound and lasting change in our lives. God sets before us a choice – choose life, God says. Choose the life you want to live and do it on purpose.  And so, I wonder: what would our lives look like if we chose to embrace, and maybe even celebrate, our limitations? What would it look like if we woke up each morning ready to do less? 

And as we contemplate these questions, I’ll leave you with the words of poet Mary Oliver, who wrote:

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life? 

G’mar Chatimah Tovah 

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