My dad has a t-shirt that says “Change is good.” He got it when we took a vacation to Vegas about ten years ago. The meaning of the message in Vegas terms is obvious, but the meaning for my dad went far beyond the slot machines.
When I was about nine years old, my dad had a heart attack. It was the scariest night of my life, and I will always remember every detail. Thankfully (in a way that words cannot even begin to express) he ended up being okay, and began a long recovery that required him to re-evaluate how he was living his life. We soon found out that the non-medical cause of the heart attack was stress. As a rabbi, he has always taken other people’s problems upon himself in an effort to help them, and there is often a lot of politics going on behind the scenes that can get pretty stressful. It turns out that my dad had gotten pretty good at bottling it all up inside him, too good, and his body had responded. He realized the magnitude of the situation, how lucky he was to be alive, and that if he didn’t make some serious changes, he might not be so lucky next time…
Read the rest of this post on Life Without Pants, where I am honored to be part of the Inconvenience of Change series.
