Going and Stopping

Today has been full of so many different pieces, its events could (and might) generate four or five blog posts.  It has been hard to nail down just one, but here goes.

This morning, I went with my daughters to the bat mitzvah of a neighborhood friend we've known since all three girls were babies.  Well, actually, I've known her father since college--we weren't friends, per se, but we did cross paths.

So, though my girls were the official invitees, I stayed with them for the bat mitzvah service.  While I grew up spending large chunks of my weekends in temple, we are not regular service attendees now, but it felt right.  And there I sat, among many of the bat mitzvah girl's family and friends, enjoying not only the beautiful music and the prayers I've known since childhood, but more, the opportunity to stop and savor this moment in time.

At my own daughter's bat mitzvah a year and a half ago, my husband talked about the importance of having ceremonies that make us stop in our "rush from here to there to somewhere else" lives and think about the milestones we get to celebrate.  And there it was today, right in front of me--this child we'd known as a baby was becoming a Jewish adult.  I thought about how my second daughter would be doing the same a year and a half from now.  We said prayers about healing the sick, one of whom was the grandfather of a friend, and prayers for people who had died, which made all three of us think about my grandmother.  So suddenly, this bat mitzvah, which I hadn't even planned to attend, became this stop in my day that allowed me to process a whole bunch of milestones all at once.

I spend a lot of my days going--from work to children and homework to events to errands.  Big to-dos--birthdays, graduations, performances--tend to zoom by and be replaced by the next big to-do.  So today, I thank goodness that I chose to stop, because it gave me time to process and appreciate, and I thank our friends and their daughter for giving us such a wonderful reason for stopping.  I'm sure it went all too fast for them, as my daughter's did for us a year and a half ago.  But the stopping will have been worth it.  I know it was for me.