Here, on the day before Rosh Hashana, we are returning in almost every sense of the word.
Obviously, we’re returning to this point in the yearly cycle. For those of us who have done #BlogElul more than once, we’re returning to this topic.
But in a larger sense, many of us find ourselves returning to old and well-worn themes within our minds, if not our lives. Questions like “Why do I keep falling into this pattern?” and also “Why can’t I seem to wrap my head around this thing.” can be common.
Rather than feeling like a failure, like this is a mental block you can’t get past, consider it a way of putting a difficult problem down, stepping away, and then coming back to it when you’re fresh – but on a larger time scale.
Sometimes we’re just not ready to tackle parts of a larger problem (even if we THINK we can. Or FEEL we should be able to already.) Sometimes, like a weird years long video game quest, we need to have other tools in our inventory before we can unlock this particular puzzle.
The point – as with so many things that matter in this world – isn’t whether or not we succeed in our first attempt, or in any particular subsequent attempt.
It’s that we continue to return to the task, and keep trying until either it or we have changed enough to move forward.