Pearl E’s Reviews > Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times > Status Update

The texted "I'm sorry" means, on the one hand, "I no longer want to have tension with you; let's be okay," and at the same time says, "I'm not going to be next to you while you go through your feelings; just let me know when our troubles are over."

I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful frame of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment, everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to the thinking of the other matter it seems less important.'

Frankl's transforming insight was that, although the Nazis had taken away virtually every freedom and vestige of humanity from the camp inmates, there was one freedom they could not take away: the freedom to choose how to respond.

Judaism tends to have a strong communal dimension. As one famous joke has it, Levy, the atheist, is asked why, when he does not believe, does he go regularly to synagogue? His reply: "I go with Mar-kowitz. Markowitz goes to talk to God, and I go to talk to Markow-itz."

Simply playing cards with friends once a week, or getting together over a cup of coffee, adds as many years to life expectancy as giving up a pack-a-day smoking habit." People with active social lives recover faster after illness.

I realized that health is not a matter of never being ill. It is the ability to
recover.