I’ve read a number of wonderful books lately and just recently began a great book on aging, “Ageless Souls” by Thomas Moore. He is a prolific writer. When I first started leafing through the book, I was amazed to find that he had written 25 other books. I’ve only gotten through 30 pages so far, but it is phenomenal. And it has gotten me thinking about myself. I am 73 now, and will be 74 in less than a month. While there are plenty of people who are older than me (many quite a bit older), my father died at 62, one of my sisters died in her 30s (breast cancer) and a lot of beautiful souls have died in childhood. Here I am at 73 about to live, please God, another beautiful day. It was beautiful when the day began, but now it is overcast, yet still beautiful nonetheless.

What makes a life beautiful? It is clearly NOT the toys and baubles that attract and excite us and motivate us to do amazing things to be able to afford them, and that unfortunately sometimes lead us to awful, illegal and terrible behavior. Just think about that very “frum” Jew who recently had the mayor of New York in his pocket and the police doing pretty much whatever he wanted. Or the many others like him. It has clearly not, in fact, anything to do with what we have, who we know, or how many people like us on Facebook. In actuality, it has very little to do with the overwhelming things that take up almost all of our time and effort. Those are things that we must do to be able to live in this world, but they aren’t what make our lives meaningful.

The truly important things are the “spiritual” things. And they can be accomplished in tiny ways unrelated to cost or effort. There are very, very poor people who do things that make this wondrous world worthwhile, and there are very wealthy people who seem to make all of creation almost worthless. That is not to say that being wealthy is worthless or being poor is wonderful. It is all about what we do with what we have and for what reason.

Realizing that actually helps me understand why I am not worried about getting older, as, it seems, many people are. And the truth is, I feel the same way about dying one day (hopefully a long time in the future). In actuality, I am really enjoying this stage of my life, despite my dementia and countless examples of forgetting things. You see, when I was younger, I was on a fast-moving, non stop treadmill. Frequently I enjoyed it, sometimes I hated it, but, for better or worse, I was on it and couldn’t get off: always doing something, always rushing somewhere. To where and to accomplish what, though? I never thought about it; I just kept going.

Now I am retired, and it is a wonderful time in my life. I still have problems. In some ways they are worse. But they don’t matter to me so much because I can’t do anything about them. We have an opportunity to spend time with friends and enjoy ourselves. We enjoy each other, enjoy our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I can read what I want, and worry less about what people think. Once in awhile we treat ourselves to a date for breakfast, or we go to Hummus Elite or the Doghouse. We have members of our ever-growing family visit for Shabbat and are greatly enjoying getting to know so many people in the community. I don’t remember them but my wife does, and often that’s enough for me to recall some of the things we discussed. Even when we are alone we usually love our time together.

Whatever your circumstances, unless you have recently suffered a terrible loss (I will try to deal with that at some point in the future), try to enjoy life and appreciate every single part of it while you can.

I will hopefully continue this topic the next time I write, but in the meantime, let us make our short sojourns through life breathtakingly worthwhile in each and every beautiful moment we are given.

By Rabbi Mordechai Glick