The Relentless Wheel

These days, everybody and his brother has a Facebook page. Facebook lures you into thinking that it’s possible, and of course, desirable, to be in touch with every distant relative and friend that you ever had since first grade. Facebook tells you that you should look up every teacher, every professor, every work colleague or acquaintance that you ever knew, and that you should spend time with them.

If you choose to believe Facebook, you’re trying to do the impossible – because there are only 24 hours in a day, and if you’re going to fill them with “Joe” from summer camp 30 years ago, you’ll simply never have time for yourself, your spouse and your kids. You’ll never sleep. You’ll never make a home-cooked meal ever again. You are choosing to be in touch with more and more people, but all that “over choice” is destroying your real, offline, life.

But it’s not just Facebook; we see this pattern of “burn out” in so many areas of modern life today. The Evil Inclination tells you that you can (and should) be a “Renaissance” person and be great in everything; that you should be multi-tasking, or at least, trying to.

Taken at face-value, it sounds like a great idea. But in the world of emuna, we always try to look past the outer “glitz”, to see what the forces of evil are really telling us. What the Evil Inclination is really telling us, is that we should all be aspiring to attain impossible goals that will burn us out, cause us to fall, and keep us so busy running after the “next thing” that we never enjoy or even experience the moment we have right now.

When we take a moment to look around, and to see where all the “multi-tasking” is getting us, we realize just how devaluing and dehumanizing it really is. Instead of behaving like human beings, the Evil Inclination is turning us into gerbils, running round in circles on the wheels of our cages until we’re 70, 80 or 90 years old – and none of us can get off!

I tried talking to a 92 year-old attorney about Rabbi Shalom Arush’s multi-million copy bestseller, the Garden of Emuna, which describes the way we can step off the wheel, and step into the world of emuna, and I had to stop. The man’s brain was still spinning so fast after being on that wheel for so long; he was too scared to hear that things could so easily have been different. And he’s not unusual. I once asked another 90 year-old man with anxiety to close his eyes and relax, and he told me that he didn’t dare. He said that he had never had a calm moment in his life and he wasn’t going to start now.

Another one of my female patients told me that all that terrible tension was the only thing that was holding her together. Of course, she was wrong. They were all wrong, caught up in a terrible mistake and a false belief that had kept them running on that relentless wheel for decades. All they needed was the courage to see that if they made some small effort, they too could find out what keeps people from all walks of life going when they feel like giving up. Emuna, which is the power of growth, can be accessed by anyone, anywhere, at any time. 

Instead of worrying about the stock market, the global depression, the crazy weather, they could start to obsess about the delightful breeze they felt when they went out for a walk; or obsess about how good it felt the first time they saw one of their children take a few steps – all obsessive thoughts that would actually put them in a good mood, for once!

Today, so many of us have simply lost the ability to be happy; we’re stuck in a world that re-enforces negativity, stoked by the media and our own Evil Inclination. But it can all be turned around by learning to identify with our souls, which are sanity, rather than with our bodies, which left unchecked, will drive us to insanity. One of the keys to living a happy, successful, emuna-based lifestyle is to listen to our holy leaders, and in particular, to follow the advice of “happiness” experts, like Rabbi Shalom Arush.

If Rabbi Arush is telling us that in our generation, if we don’t have the time to both learn and pray, we should be putting our emphasis on praying – we need to listen. If he tells us that our family and kids are more important than climbing the ladder of success – then we need to reduce our overtime hours, and start investing more hours with them. If our families want to see more of us, we need to stop making excuses and say “Of course! That would be my greatest pleasure!” (And then, we need to thank G-d that they still want to speak to us after all the times we’ve ignored them…)