I have found it

The hardest part of meeting yourself is realizing that you have flaws.  Everyone likes to see themselves as perfect, without flaws or negative traits. The truth is we all have things to work on.  This week end I sat down with myself to work out what my biggest flaw is, with a little help from someone very close to me, I have found that it is fear.

Fear is not only being a afraid of heights or spiders, but also of people and even myself.  Now having it picked out it is too hard to figure out what I am to do about fixing this problem.  The solution to the problem is to figure out what is the positive trait that I have that will cancel out the negative trait.  So for now I am going to be trying to find the point in my life that make me fearful and close up and work on defeating my fear.

Next order of business is to find out what my positive trait is, so that I can progress and move forward in my life. I am getting a little tired of holding myself back.  It is time that I take a stand for my own life and move forward.  No more stepping back.

Why Come To Class At All?

Something that I have noticed in classes is that more and more students have been coming to class and spending the entire lecture talking to their friends. It is one thing if you are coming to class and spend the whole time on Facebook or iChat talking to your friends but speaking out loud in class is not okay.  With a society with so much technology the issues of speaking in class and passing notes should be beyond us.  If I want to share someone with the person sitting next to me or even 5 rows ahead of me all I have to do is pick up my phone or open Facebook.

This has gotten so bad that there are professors who stop every few minutes to tell students to be quiet.  I have even ad one class where the professor just told the students to, "keep it to a dull roar." How can you run a class when there is so much going on? I can nearly keep a conversation going in a one on one setting when there is other stuff going on around me, let alone teach a class while 140 students are having private conversations in front of you.

This problem may be too big to handle.  Out current society has been promoting short attention spans. It seems like too big a task for most people to sit through an hour and a half lecture.  But on the flip side why is it so easy for people sit in front of a computer or television for hours on end.  A much as I would like to suggest a solution, the problem is too big and there are too many other more important problems in the world.  My biggest issue is just that I feel that my education is not at the level that it could be because there are other students in the room who do not feel that they have to pay attention.

If this is how you feel then don't come to class and if you do come to class just to be present please be quiet and curious to students who are here to learn.  The must be some secret solution because you walk into a library and no one would dare speak out loud, but a lecture is your social scene.

Say Hello to Yourself, Part 2

Yesterday we began the journey for finding myself. This is going to be a long journey and this is only the beginning.  Today we will continue this journey with part 2.

Building off of yesterday's post. I wrote about the character traits that run along the vertical axis of the "bet." In this post we are going to go a little bit more in depth about these traits and what they mean. A brief re-cap from yesterday is that these character traits dictate how you live your life. To illustrate this point please see the image here:

As you can see it is flowers growing a flower pot.  You may ask where am I going with this, but please bear with me because I too was confused when I first saw it.  We will start at the bottom of the pot.  Here is where all the dirt is. This is the lowest point in your life. The side of the pot on the far right is your negative trait. This is the trait that brings you down to your lowest point in life.  Say you get jealous easily it is the one thing that brings you down.  So whenever you are jealous of someone you are down at the bottom of the flower pot and you have to figure out a way out. How you may ask?  This is where your positive trait comes in.  The left side of the flower pot is your positive trait, it is the one thing that no matter what will bring you up.  When you are brought up to the surface you are happy and smiling like the pretty flowers shown in the drawing.

We all know that a plant with good strong and healthy roots is a healthy rooted plant.  The same goes for yourself.  If you know what brings you down and you know how to counter act it with what brings you back up again then your roots will be firmly planted in the ground.  When they roots are firmly planted then you can stand up straighter and have a more positive outlook on life. It is very important to identify your traits so that you will know when you are experiencing then to keep you from getting stuck in the mud.

If I knew what my two traits are I would share them, but at this moment I am still trying to work that out. It is not easy to get to know yourself. It is hard enough to find time to sit down with someone else and talk to them, when do you ever have enough time to sit down and have a heart to heart with yourself?  But I have found that this time is very important to have with yourself, because you can search the internet and the world all you want but there is no one in the whole world who can tell you who YOU are.

Say Hello to Yourself, Part 1

Something that I have really been struggling with these past few years is figuring out who I am. Now it seems that posting this on a blog would not be the appropriate place but I have found that just writing things down in notebooks/diaries or what have you have not really been working for me. Ergo I will try to work out this dilemma here.

This week, actually last night I was at a very interesting class on learning about myself. I like to feel that I am pretty comfortable with myself. Most people today really are not so comfortable with themselves. You can tell who is and who is not, those who spend an astronomical amount of time on facebook, their phones, with music or in constant company of an other person are not comfortable with themselves. Last year in a class I took about Pirke Avot (Ethics of our Fathers) we spoke a little about being comfortable with ones self. Since that is not the focus of this post I will leave that for another time.

Now since I do not want to make this post too overwhelmingly long I will split it into 2 parts.

This part will just start with the basic background. This class started off talking about why the first letter of the Torah is a "Bet" ב the reasoning behind this will be shown in the following drawing.

First things to know is that the base line is called the life line. It is the chronological line that your life progresses on. The line along the top of the Bet is the sky line, it is in a way Shamayim. Now the red lines represent what you do in your life. You will notice that they are curved, this is to show us that what ever we put into life is what we will be getting out of it. Here is where I'm starting my journey. When you are negative in your life then only negative things will come back to you, the same with positive things.

Along the vertical line of the bet is where our traits and deeds come in. In the next post we will speak more about the traits and deeds, but basically they are what you are "sending" up to shamayim. When you do a good deed, it promotes your good trait and good things will come back down to you from shamayim.

Now the pink boxes near the top are where faith comes in. There is an argument that because Jews do not have faith. I'm not really sure that I believe that. But faith sits there because it is the connection between your doings in the world and what shamayim is sending down to you.

One last point on the bet before I end this post. Someone in the class asked why the Torah didn't start with a "Kuff" כ after all they are the same shape. But you will notice that on the bet there is a small extra piece that is not under the shamayim. This small piece represents the time when you are a child and don't have control of your actions in the world. This is the time when things are only coming down because you do not have to capabilities yet to change what you are sending up.

Starting over

This is the beginning. Everyone at some point in their life has a moment, on occasion it could be more than one moment where you start over. This last October I opened a new chapter in my life. This was a major step for me, and I feel that there are pieces and parts that are worth sharing.

This past October I made Aliya (immigrated to Israel). This was a huge step making a major change in my life moving to a place with such a different culture than what I was used to growing up. While is is taking time to get used to, i have been slowly solwly finding my place. The question that I have been asked many times regarding this decision was why? I found that this time was a good time to do it and Israel is the one place that I have always felt more at home. When I got to the point of deciding where I wanted to study and live there was no where that I really wanted to be more than here.

My second big change this year was that I started university. Putting that on top of moving to a new country is a very difficult situation to deal with. So far I am half way through the year and things have been going fairly well thus far so I cannot complain.

My goal for this blog is to share my experiences in this changing time of my life and hopefully to discover more about myself and where I stand in the world. There is no better way to see how you grow than through your writing, when you write it all down you are able to go back and see where the changes happened and even how they happened.