Tonight as I was braiding my challah my roommate asked, “So how many weeks have you been doing this?” I checked the calendar and realized that this is the fortieth week of my challah project. The FORTIETH week! I have been making challah for almost an entire year! As we know, forty is a spiritually significant number in Judaism. …
As Ingrid Fettell Lee says, focusing on small moments of joy unlocks deeper happiness. Looking for joy changes your orientation to the world; no matter how difficult things get, it’s possible to find little joys everywhere. Here is a list of 50 joyful things:
Hey, all, I just wanted to take a look at some common shidduch clichés and reexamine them. What I find the most irritating about the items on this list is that they all make such sweeping generalities and then leave it up to you to know how, or even whether, to apply them to your situation. Which isn’t really fair, …
This week my roommate helped me prepare for a job interview. We discussed what I would say when the interviewer would inevitably ask why I left Career #1. I hemmed and hawed, not sure how my answers sounded, when my roommate said, “You could just tell them you didn’t like it so you switched to something you enjoy.” This …
I’ve been in shidduchim for many years now, and there were times I was extremely lonely and times I wasn’t lonely at all. It depended on a few factors, including how interested I was in marriage, how many close friends were around, and what other fulfilling relationships — like new friends I made at work, or my extended family — …
A long time ago, I wrote about the importance of always having something to look forward to. At the time I was near the beginning of my graduate school journey; now I’m almost done. I am so incredibly grateful that I took the plunge and went back to school. Looking back on the past two years, I see that every …
I read the following in Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal, by Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen:
Last week we talked about the pain of rejection, which is so real and present for many of us. At the same time, there is the struggle of being the one to say no yourself, and for some women (wildly raises hand) this is very difficult to do. Like extremely, in some cases (keeps hand raised). Because many of us …
I listened to a really interesting podcast episode about the history of the laugh track. Did you know that hearing a laugh track actually makes jokes seem funnier? That’s because of emotional contagion, the phenomenon where one person’s emotions trigger the same emotions in someone else. That’s also why the headlines we read each day and the images we look …
One of my friends knows to expect a certain text from me every so often: What am I doing wrong? Nothing, you’re doing everything you can be doing. There must be something I’m forgetting. Something. No, you do hishtadlus, you go out, you work on yourself, you have people you talk to. There must be another …
