Why I Write

I am turning forty soon—22nd of Sivan, just weeks away.

And what do I have to show for it?

We are in Iyar now. I write this on the 21st of Iyar. Today is my father's yahrtzeit. What have I done with the life he handed me?

I’ve been through the wringer this year. But don't get me wrong, Hashem has given me a beautiful life filled with blessing. My life is overflowing with light. Brilliant light.

Amid the most difficult struggles, I am showered with unending gifts.

Yet am I thankful?

I know what you’re thinking, reading this.

“Don't be hard on yourself.”

“You have done great things.”

The same pat on the shoulder we give each other because we forgot how to sit in each other's pain. We forgot how to tell each other to get it together. Like forgetting how to ride a bike, which was supposed to be impossible.

You need to understand I’m not fishing for compliments here. This isn't a woe-is-me moment or self-pity; it’s a man issuing orders to himself.

I know what I am. I know that what I’ve shared with the world so far is but a tiny shard of what I am.

When I ask myself, “What have I done with my life?” I am asking not as a katan, a whiny child complaining about his lot in life, but as a man making demands of his life. Finally.

It is time to become something more.

Rebbi Akiva began learning at forty.

And then he fundamentally changed the face of history.

Rebbi Akiva’s story should have ended this month. Gone. Dust to dust, all that jazz, so it goes.

Iyar was his month to fall into obscurity, everything he worked for destroyed, dead, strewn about.

Yet, a man who starts from nothing at age forty will not easily break.

A man who lived his purpose so fiercely, he turned around when his wife made it clear any deviation from the purpose would be unacceptable.

See, when his wife Rachel said that her husband could stay away another twelve years, she wasn't grandstanding.

She realigned the protocols.

He turned back because if he didn’t, he wouldn’t have just failed his wife; he’d have failed himself—the man carved out of stone at the age of forty.

Now, it is my time to carve and chip away at everything that is not me.

I’ve got a month before I have to get my own program spooled up and running.

At forty, it’s time to finally stop chasing the empty whispers of sweet nothings. Stop keeping my head down, checking the boxes on a list someone else made. Waiting for the weekend. Waiting for a day that will never come. That is slavery.

God took us out of Egypt, out of slavery to flesh and blood, not to become slaves again to other people, but to tie ourselves to Him.

True freedom is not found in the responsible things someone else decided for you. It's found in the lap of Hashem. In letting the chains of this world fall away. To realign the protocols and attach myself to the only thing that ever was solid, Hashem.

But we all have a little Pharaoh in our heart, beating away at us, whispering, yelling, cajoling. “Submit, SUBMIT, submit…” Submit to a life of mediocrity and the boredom of middle-class, middle-age, and ill-fitting suits that impress no one.

“How?” you ask me.

How will I do this thing?

Forty is the year I’m supposed to have it all figured out. It's when I finally allow myself to be myself. Right?

Right.

Maybe… actually no.

It's the year they say you are supposed to give up on what you thought you could become. The unwritten expectation to keep your head down and stop making such a fuss.

Whatever you are, they want you to keep in line. The unspoken contract of all adults in this century. Don't reach for something higher.

“Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?” - Robert Browning

Rebbi Akiva didn't accept that.

If Rebbi Akiva had gotten his life together at twenty years old, the story wouldn't have been that memorable. He’d just be another twenty-something kid who flipped out when he went to yeshiva.

No.

It had to be forty.

Rebbi Akiva would try to bite a Talmid Chacham like a donkey. He was stubborn. Hard as a rock. You would never believe he would come to anything.

If you can get your life turned around at forty, a life that has already solidified into unmovable granite, you are a true Gibor.

So, I sit here staring at the great wellspring of my life, seeing it spill over into nothing, going nowhere.

Drip, drop.

Sit and stare.

For forty years I sat and stared, and now maybe for the first time I notice the drip-dropping carve a small groove into the hard rock of my life.

I had thrown away what Hashem had given me and tried to build my own cisterns. Broken cisterns that hold nothing.

And I know that I can change. I can change. But I'm here in my mold.

I am here in my mold.

The truth is that the world wants you to think it's harder than it is. That the secret is way out there beyond the mountains and the sea, for you to endlessly search. The ancient lie. To think that God would let you flounder on your own. Lies.

He gave you what you need. It's in your heart and mouth to do it.

My well was already built and prepared by my Father in heaven. And it overflows.

It overflows and carves grooves into rock, and carves and carves.

So what is a Gibor? We’ll get there. For now, I write.

I write because a supernova lives in my head, begging to explode.

It's been trying to come out for years, but I was afraid.

Afraid of what you might think of me, afraid that I might be wrong. Afraid... that I might be right.

Now is the time to write.

Time to man up and shape this stone into the thing it was supposed to be.

This is why I write Gibor. The words are my chisel.

"I don't speak because I have the power to speak; I speak because I don't have the power to remain silent." - Rav Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook

Maybe you have a path hidden in you, too. Snaking its way across your heart, your mind, and your soul. Begging to be tread.

Maybe not. Maybe your path is too overgrown. Maybe you think it leads nowhere. If you thought that, you wouldnt be reading this.

My father taught me the rocking chair test.

When you are ninety and sitting on the front porch in your favorite rocking chair, thinking back to these moments when the hidden places were still visible, will you regret not doing it?

What weighs more, a pound of discipline or a ton of regret?

Walk with me—hammer in hand—and help me chip away some of this stone.

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