Today is Day 3 of the Omer. . . Ha-yom shlishi yamim la-omer.
THE OMER INTERSECTION: Chesed + Tiferet; Loving Kindness, meet beauty and compassion.
We all know that passion is a part of love. And again, for this week, when talking about love, this is the expansive, all-types of love (romantic/familial/platonic . . .). Any kind of love involves an excitement of our heartstrings and our soul - a driving force that makes us want to behave towards those we love in a way that we might not otherwise be a part of our inclination. Yesterday, we explored how we reign-in that passion so that we do not lose ourselves in the ways we love and to ensure that we do not lose those we love by our over-(or under-)zealousness.
Today, we approach this passion from the viewpoint of Tiferet, beauty and/or compassion. I should qualify this a bit more: beauty and compassion are often intimately linked. Often, what we experience as beauty in this world is born out of a moment of compassion - a beautiful act of a child reaching out to help another or a parent who manages to get to a child's baseball game in support in-between business meetings. This is the aspect of beauty that tiferet represents.
When thinking of this virtue of tiferet, for some reason, I could not help thinking back to my engineering days in which I was in charge of a project to create a system of continual change using five "S's": 1) Sort, 2) Set in order, 3) SHINE, 4) Standardize, 5) Sustain. Once every item was sorted out and the excess was removed, and each item, tool, process, etc, had a place that was identified to be the place where it belonged, we would make the workplace SHINE. We went above and beyond to make every one of these identified spots visually obvious and looking really nice so that there would be motivation and ease in making sure that all items continued to "live" in their "homes." For example, if a wrench that was needed for a certain assembly was supposed to be kept in a certain drawer where that work was done, we would carve out a mold in the shape of that wrench so that it would fit exactly in the drawer. We'd label it and color-code it with the assembly, so that no matter where that wrench was found, someone could return it to where it should be.
Tiferet reminds us to make our passions shine. In all our loving kindness, all the acts that we are motivated to do out of our passions, we are challenged on this day to make those acts SHINE. Often, the gestures we make just come out a bit half-hearted. We rely on the fact that we are making any efforts at all to do something kind for our loved ones, and hope that they will appreciate the act. But we are all busy, and we don't always notice subtle cues. So, perhaps our challenge is to make our acts of loving kindness so obvious and clear and understandable, so BEAUTIFUL, that our loved ones will have no choice but realize that we are showing them how much we care.
THE OMER CHALLENGE:
So, how do we apply this idea? I guess I've already started with the suggestion that we make our love SHINE by making our loving gestures so beautifully obvious as to allow our loved ones to recognize that they are loved. But what does that look like? What does that mean? How do we bring beauty to the way we treat our loved ones? One of the ideas of beauty involves compassion - we find compassionate acts to be beautiful - when we turn our passion into COMpassion, we make our acts more obvious and visible, not just so that they are noticed, but so that they are felt and come across as sincere. When it comes to love and relationship, we tend to have an ability to sense whether or not an act is genuine. So, it is difficult to fake a beautiful gesture. This is where the compassion comes in to our paradigm of beauty.
OK, enough of the ephemeral, philosophical thought here. Let's get to the brass tax. So, what might we do today? Make detailed plans to surprise a loved one with something special. Tap into your sense of compassion for the other to find something that they really would want and even need. And go the extra mile to include small, personalized details - not just to show that you care, but to make the other person feel cared for. Often, such acts take planning and preparation, so it does not have to take place today. But start the ball rolling, and get some of the details ironed out today. Believe me, you'll thank me later when you get to see the look on your loved one's face - it will be a moment of beauty!
THE OMER UPDATE:
Okay. So, yesterday's challenge was to remove our ego from some of our relationships and make it fully about the other. While it may be a fairly simple intention, it is slightly more challenging in practice, since we all have our own agendas and responsibilities that can get in the way. And these play into our egos. For example, I had every intention of spending some time this morning just playing with my daughter, Laila, and following her around and giving to her on her terms. But, I also had work to get to and all that goes with getting ready for work. When idealizing the concept, I hadn't thought of these aspects of ego that go into our perceptions of self and the ways they can get in the way of how we love. But I guess this is a part of the omer experience: not just to learn and grow from our positive realizations, but also from those that help us to see where we have room for personal development.
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