Treasures of the Heart, Not Your Treasures

Another item on my Bucket List is to continue learning so I was thrilled when my Rosh Chodesh spirituality group offered a mini course in Ethical Wills. The added bonus was that my historian friend, Sue, was the facilitator.

Wikepedia An Ethical will (Hebrew: "Zava'ah") is a document designed to pass ethical values from one generation to the next. Rabbis and Jewish laypeople have continued to write ethical wills during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (Reimer) In recent years, the practice has been more widely used by the general public.:
WIKIPEDIA Ethical Will

Our first session was about an ethical will's purpose and how/why people choose to write one. "An ethical will is putting your values on paper."  Oh dear, this is not going to be easy as this project means the big 'R' as in 'Reflection.'  A lifetime of reflecting...

Perhaps passing 50 years of age naturally gives one cause to pause and reflect on life and consider  mortality.  The reality is that we are not getting younger.  So what 'legacy' do we want to leave our family/friends?  Here's an opportunity to be introspective (and a bit narcissistic) to write down who we are, why we lived as we have lived and even what we hope that we have/ want to have accomplished with this life. The good, the bad and the ugly if we so desire.

Our first session's homework was to think about for whom we would be leaving this document and decide what questions/ info we would want to know about a dear one and then transfer those questions to ourselves. An exercise in session 2 had us write self descriptive adjectives and then see if there was a pattern. Heck the only pattern I saw was with the more time I had to write, the adjectives got increasingly more negative.  Sue was reassuring saying that we can be 'thoughtful' and then sometimes 'thoughtless.' Evaluating why /how we are these adjectives is a whole other ball of wax.

Another exercise had us considering life's turning points. A timeline was useful as was deciding if these events were positive/negative. I told you this was heavy. Growing up in a very over- protective and controlled environment made escapes to camp,  Youth Group conventions, Girls State, travel, University even marriage ... all major independent events for me. Hmmm...

And what advice do we hand down?  My Mom always taught me never to pass up an opportunity to use a restroom since you never knew when you'd have the next opportunity. This lesson has served me well.  There are so many life lessons! It's what's inside that counts, right? My 'value' statement list is also  growing with about 20 items already. Number one on the list is a Jewish tenet to ' Leave the world better than you found it' ...

Whether it's advice/ stories there are many ways to organize this 'will'.  One learns a lot about oneself in the process.  As you can imagine this document could be one page or even turn into a book. It all depends upon the writer.

Hopefully there will be a lot time to continually revise my Ethical Will before some of its contents need to be used in an obit/ memorial and hopefully this is one keepsake that I can complete during my time here in the End of the Rainbow Valley...