Honor the Transitions

Today, the country of Israel observes its Memorial Day. Tomorrow the country celebrates its Independence Day. There’s much to be said about how that country observes Memorial Day — a stark contrast to how it is “observed” in the United States. We can also learn a lot from how the two observances occur on back-to-back days, pairing the sacrifice made by a country’s soldiers with the freedoms the residents of the country enjoy today.

On one hand, this is life: we can experience both profound sadness and immense joy even in the same moment, let alone on consecutive days. Emotions don’t follow our preferred time schedules. On other other hand, it can be difficult to jump from one emotion to the other.

One important thing to note here is that in the Hebrew calendar, each day begins in the evening. If we had these two occasions on consecutive days in the US, we would just go to sleep at the end of one day and wake up in the next day.

(Which is, really, a perfect metaphor for how Americans handle most transitions.)

But when one day ends and the next starts before you’ve gone to sleep, how do you make that leap from sadness to joy, or from one emotional and mental context to another?

You do so by honoring the transition.

Everything in nature is cyclical, not linear. The cycle of days, which mirrors the cycle of seasons, flows like a circle, not a square. There are no hard stops and sharp corners to turn. In the daily cycle, there is a time between sunset and nightfall — an in-between time — in which we transition from one day to the next.

This transition time between Israel’s Memorial Day and Independence Day is marked with a ceremony, called a Tekes Ma’avar, which is a transition ritual that takes us from a day of solemn rememberance to a day of celebration and joy.

For word Geeks:

Tekes means ceremony. It is derived from the Greek word taxis, meaning order or arrangement, although it doesn’t convey the same type of order and arrangement as the word seder connotes. The Greek taxis is also the source of the English word taxonomy.)

Ma’avar comes from the same root of the word ivri, which is the Hebrew word for Hebrew. It means to cross-over.

How to Apply This

So, why should you care about this? What’s the relevance to us in day-to-day life?

We experience transitions all the time, not just in big life moments like a new job or a new home, but in every day life. There are natural transitions in the cycle of the day: dawn and dusk, waking up and going to sleep. And there are also transitions in our activities.

We often fail to notice or honor these transitions. This has been an issue in our culture for a long time, as technology makes it easy for us to check email from anywhere, so we never fully disengage from work. Honoring transitions is especially important for those of us with ADHD, as we need those buffer times to process all that our minds take in.

These days, everyone is experiencing this challenge under quarantine because we’ve lost natural transitions, like commuting from one place to the next.

Many people I speak with wonder why they feel more tired now than they did before, even though they’re doing less running around. This is one reason: when you’re working and living in the same place, you lose those natural transitions from one context to the next.

One easy solution for your fatigue: honor the transitions.