Every Day’s Diamond

When we look at our lives, we usually assess them in weeks, months, and years, but yet, in truth, we are meant to focus on days.

Kabbalists teach that a person is given an exact amount of days to live. Within each day there is a spark of Light that one is meant to perfect. The totality of all the work that is done in any given day, from restricting anger to sharing, goes into the perfection of the spark of Light of that day.

In the Bible, people lived for hundreds of years, but then life expectancy dropped. The kabbalists explain this with a parable. There was once a King who owned a diamond mine. After extracting the diamonds, he would give thousands of them at a time to local craftsmen, whose job it was to clean and perfect the stones over several months’ time. The only problem was that they never completed the work. In fact, some of the diamonds came back damaged. Therefore, the King set up a new method by which he gave each craftsman a smaller amount and less time to get the job done.

The same happened with humanity. Initially, the Creator gave each person millions of sparks of Light, one corresponding to each day of life they were given. But although people lived for hundreds of years, they often did not perfect their sparks. In fact, they damaged them. Therefore, the Creator cut down the amount of sparks given to each person all at once.

We are not given 80, 100, or 120 years of life. We are given 29,200 days, 36,500 days, or 43,800 days, and within each one, we are meant to perfect a spark of Light. The spark we are meant to perfect today cannot be perfected tomorrow, just as the spark we could have perfected yesterday cannot be perfected today. Each day has its own unique work relating to a specific aspect of soul that needs purification and elevation.

The Kabbalists teach that at the end of every day, as we go to sleep, if we have perfected our spark, it is sent up into our spiritual bank where it remains to protect us and to give us Light and blessings. When a person succeeds in this work, often the Creator will give him even more sparks, which, of course, equals more days, months, and years of life. Naturally, the opposite holds true as well.

The most important understanding from all this is that we do not live weeks, months, and years; we live day by day. The work we have to accomplish today cannot be accomplished tomorrow.

This week, awaken within your consciousness an appreciation for the power and tremendous gift of every day. When you internalize this understanding, even if days do not start off the way you had hoped, you will not write them off and push things into tomorrow. You will realize that what you need to accomplish today you can only accomplish today, and know that as you are perfecting and sending up the sparks, you are not only creating an amazing bank of Light that flows down to you, but you are also earning more days and more sparks to perfect.

Taking On the Pain of Others

The Zohar explains that the only way we can help others is by taking upon ourselves a little bit of their pain and difficulty. Very often we have a true desire to help our children, friends, spouses, and students, and so we teach them, or advise them, or give to them in some form. However, to ensure that our assistance actually makes a difference, we need to decide how much pain we are willing to go through in order to help that person.

Because, as the Zohar teaches, we cannot truly help another unless we make ourselves uncomfortable.

For those of us who are truly interested in the perfection and correction of our world, when was the last time we made ourselves terribly uncomfortable in order to assist another person? When was the last time we took upon ourselves somebody else’s pain in a way that made us uncomfortable; in a way that hurt us? We’re not expected to become martyrs. But if we do want to be part of the correction of our world, then there must be an element of sacrifice to our sharing.

If we are not willing to break ourselves a little bit in order to help another person, then we cannot truly help another person. To be assisting when it is comfortable, to be teaching when it is easy, that does something, yes. But it cannot bring us to the ultimate correction. The only path, the only way that we can be a part of that correction of our world is to the degree that we are willing to be uncomfortable, to the degree that we are willing to take upon ourselves an element of pain to assist other people.

Don’t think about all the great things you can do to help other people, don’t think about all the great things you can do to reveal Light in this world. Those are nice thoughts, but they are not a tremendous part of this global correction. Instead, look for times when you can put yourself in an uncomfortable situation in order to help another person.

These are the times that will bring us to the ultimate correction.

In Happy Relationships There is an Openness to Work Together

In an earlier post I mentioned the work of researcher Dr. Gottman and his insights into personal relationships after having studied thousands of married couples for the past 35 years. This is another excerpt from an interview he gave in the Harvard Business Review which I find to be very true and very enlightening:

“…one test we’ve used for years is the “paper tower task.” We give couples a bunch of materials, such as newspaper, scissors, Scotch tape, and string. We tell them to go build a paper tower that is freestanding, strong, and beautiful, and they have half an hour to do it. Then we watch the way the couples work. It’s the very simple things that determine success.

One time we had three Australian couples do the task. Beforehand, we had the couples talk on tape about each other and about a major conflict in their relationship that they were trying to resolve. So we had some data about how relatively happy or unhappy they were. When one couple who came across as happy started building their paper tower, the man said, “So, how are we going to do this?” The woman replied, “You know, we can fold the paper, we can turn the paper, we can make structures out of the paper.” He said, “Really? Great.” It took them something like ten seconds to build a tower.

The wife in an unhappily married couple started by saying, “So how are we going to do this?” Her husband said, “Just a minute, can you be quiet while I figure out the design?” It
didn’t take much time to see that this couple would run into some difficulties down the line.”