Yom Kippur, as it is known in Hebrew, comes ten days after the Jewish new year, and during that time we are encouraged to reflect on the mistakes we have made in the previous 12 months – the friends we have fallen out with, the resolutions we haven’t kept, the dreams we didn’t act on – and consider ways of doing things differently in the year ahead.
As I sat through the services, a little spacey from the fasting, I found myself reflecting on what stops us acknowledging mistakes in “real” life and how it sometimes takes something as significant as an awe-filled religious festival to bring our lives back into focus. We all have dreams, plans, good intentions, and at the time we make them they seem so full of promise. Yet let them lie for a few days and they tend to get swept aside by the minutiae of life, so we find another 12 months has passed without having given them a chance.
I think – and this is a personal view – that our clumsiness with good intentions comes from being just a little too comfortable, which makes us risk-averse. Why bother changing jobs when our current one is “kind of” OK? Why get in touch with someone we have fallen out with when we have enough friends as it is? Why take up a new hobby when we have so many half-hearted ones already?
Steve Jobs, who died just before Yom Kippur, gave an inspiring speech to Stanford University students that is very much worth taking 20 minutes to watch in full on YouTube. In it he quoted the Whole Earth Catalog’s advice to “stay hungry, stay foolish”, and on Saturday I found myself making a resolution to try be a little hungrier and more foolish in life myself. I think one leads to the other: if you have less to lose, you will risk more. And more risk, in the end, means more reward.
The prayers on Yom Kippur return again and again to the inevitability of death and our absolute inability to know when it will come. Jobs, whose death has unleashed an almost Diana-like wave of grieving, seems to have understood that lesson more than many. “Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life,” he told the Stanford students. “Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.”
We shy away from thoughts of death, for obvious reasons, but perhaps Jobs’ own death gives us a chance to transform its influence in our lives from a terrifying prospect into a powerful motor for change. As the old adage goes, we won’t look back on our deathbeds and think, “Thank goodness I stayed those extra hours in the office.” But do we really know what we will look back on with joy and satisfaction? Perhaps it’s time to give that some thought and engage with those things that will make our lives a little more meaning.
David Baker is a new faculty member of The School of Life. His next session will be How To Balance Work With Life – 20 October and How to Find a Job you love – 22 Oct. If you're keen to take stock of this and consider how we think about death and approach life, come to our next 'How To Face Death' class on the 15th November.
Head to www.davidbakeronline.com for some more.
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