I thought about making this a sequel to How To Breathe New Life Into A Shmata but decided against it. Not because I couldn’t say more about the friend who died and the other who is battling illness because I could.
Nor was it because those two stories are an active reminder that life can turn on a dime but because sometimes you have to let the story go the way it wishes to.
There was a conversation about the kind of professions we could have had if we had gone in different directions.
Given my five year foray into genealogy it occurred to me that I had a great grandfathers who were tailors, machinists, and pants makers.
I had an uncle who was a hat maker and another who was a goldsmith.
Had things been slightly different I could have been in the shmata business and done well. Heck, I am still learning more about family lore and it is entirely possible I might be shmata royalty.
But then again had some of my ancestors made slightly different choices I could have easily been another rabbi in the tree.
Could have grown up in the U.K., South Africa or Israel. Could have been easily born in South America and who knows what would have happened with any one of those.
Every single one of those options covers places I have family and rests upon choices made by other generations.
Given that my parents met in South America I have had conversations about how real a possibility that was.
It has been an action packed week filled with a mix of really good and some really bad news. A week in which it spurred something I always think of as echoes of the future.
Call it a fancy way of saying it is a vision in my head of a future I expect to see.
There was a moment today when a thought unexpectedly crossed my mind and I was certain that I ought to adjust it to echoes of the future ringing in the present.
My mind had been focused on something else and then I saw this parade of images run through my head and thought it is pretty damn likely to happen.
Had you asked me about it 18 months ago I would have said it is unlikely but sometimes life surprises you and you see opportunities that you had thought were gone come back to life.
It is one of those things in life that makes me shake my head and snort because bad circumstances can change and then you find yourself on that carousel pony with one more chance to grab the ring.
Anyway I had a conversation with the younger Mr. Wilner about this. It wasn’t this exact situation but I talked about the vision I had back in Los Angeles for what could happen if I took a chance and took another shot at Texas.
Because the opportunity didn’t materialize over night and required a significant amount of effort. It also required some willingness to take a risk that things might not go as I hoped.
The kids will tell you sometimes the best advice I have had for challenging situations is to fight through them and that is what I did here.
I fought through it and relied upon figuring it out as I went.
Seven years later it mostly seems to have worked. There are several metrics I can use to measure success and they all point the right way.
Sometimes I smile and shake my head because it has been a battle and sometimes I think about what would have happened if I was shmata royalty.
Could have been the head of a big business and been my own boss. Sometimes I like that idea, especially having had moments where freelancing was how I made a buck.
But there are benefits to this other path too and given what I see on the horizon I am kind of excited to see if it matches the vision and image in my head.
I think life it about to get very interesting.
