praying for the courage to live

When I was a little kid, my family used to make fun of me because I would randomly come up with all these tidbits of information and when asked how I knew, I would inevitably be known to have "overheard" them from people around me, oftentimes strangers.

I think I've always prided myself on my ability to "overhear" information, whether it is aurally or by "stalking" people, organizations, institutions, etc online or via reading signs on bulletin boards that nobody else reads. Sometimes this is helpful; sometimes it leads to a paralysis and lack of action in the face of information overload.

As anyone who has lived with me knows, I constantly find myself distracted by the sudden need to search online for any number of random questions or thoughts that pop into my head at all hours of the day, and many of the night. My new roommate, who I have known for all of about 5 weeks already remarked to a friend of hers that I'm like her personal web-searcher, and I must spend all my time "surfing the web" (a phrase I would never use) while she's doing her homework. Sadly, that's closer to the truth than you could possibly imagine.

I don't know why I constantly feel compelled to do this. But it's really become and addiction and I'm constantly fighting with it in order to get ANYTHING done, including eating, going to the bathroom, going to sleep, getting any homework done, and going outside so I don't become a hermit lacking in Vitamin D. It often makes me wish the internet/computers had never been invented (or so widespread and accessible).

I'm not sure why I'm writing about this, except that in terms of my constant stalking/searching about people, I think it stems from a strong fear of interaction with people in real life. I somehow subconsciously spend so much time searchign about people online, that it often prevents me from ever having to go about real life.

This afternoon I found myself sitting on our backporch, which faces into a leafy courtyard, trying to get some homework done. Although I was fairly interested in what I was reading, I was constantly drawn to listening/watching two people across the courtyard, whose porch also looks into their kitchen, who were preparing and then eating dinner, talking all the while.
Then I got as excited as a light clicked in a room in another apt, where a man sat down at a bunch of music mixing equipment.

I think the "overhearing" was the beginning of this need to constantly look into other people's lives and enviously wish I had [elements of or] their lives. I think this is a common behavior for adolescents, but maybe because I was doing it way before then, I never got over it and it often creates a lot of negative energy and wasted time in my life.

On both Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the Rabbis at both my parents' shul and the shul I went to here in Cambridge spent a lot of time talking about overcoming our own negative habits that prevent us from living, as Oprah would call it "our best life." On RH, the Rabbi used the metaphor of smashing our own personal idols, based on the Midrash of Abraham and the idols; on YK, the Rabbi dwelled particularly on a piece of the Avodah service, the prayer of the Kohen Gadol, in which we, in the tradition of the Israelites in the Temple, prayed for the residents of the Sharon valley ( a part of Israel), that "their homes not become their graves." In the prayer it refers specifically to the fact that those people lived (and presumably still do) on a fault line and constantly lived "in fear of sudden earthquakes." (My roommate, a native of California, took great issue with the repetitiveness of saying "sudden earthquakes," as all earthquakes are ostensibly sudden.) The Rabbi then made reference to an extended metaphor about how our own negative habits and inertia to not live the life we want to be living causes "our homes to become our graves," a metaphor which, though profoundly depressing, makes a lot of sense to me.

This slightly related post by ZT almost brought me to tears and helped bring the point of the 2 sermons home as well.

Every time I think about these ideas, portrays the imagery of the Neilah service of YK, that the "gates are closing" every second of every day, and it exponentially increases the importance of each action and each day, ideally changing the way I look at life. The question is if it actually is effective enough to actually change the way I live my life.

I hope so. This is a problem I have tried to deal with multiple times, with minimal progress each time. I hope I have the courage to spend less time peering into the mundanities of other people's lives and actually live the life I want to be living. A very simple concept but one that seems drastically different from my usual mode of operation. and I imagine many other people's as well.