As some of you might know, I was just in Israel for an incredible nine-day tour, jam-packed with classes, touring, learning, pampering, connecting, and all the good things you’d want in a trip. Dini Coopersmith’s Women’s Reconnection Trip was just fantastic, and I can’t recommend it enough (full disclosure: I was part of the itinerary, so I guess this is a shameless plug in a sense, lol).

Now that I’m home and adjusting to jet lag and the reality of my daily grind, I obviously want to find a way to incorporate the incredible rush of inspiration I felt on the trip into my “regular” life.

This is always easier said than done, because while I might be flying high from inspiration, life has a way of taking those lofty feelings and making them feel too otherworldly to tap into while the laundry piles up, the house becomes trashed and the children squabble.

One thing that I’m immediately implementing is a new video series called Silver Livings with Rivki Silver (that’s me!). I’m going to make a short (very short. very very short) video each day where I take something that’s frustrating or annoying or otherwise negative and look for the good part of it, the silver lining, so to speak. I’d love to hear what silver linings you find in your life. I’m hoping to post these videos on both instagram and my blog’s Facebook page.

Another thing I hope to do is to continue to make a list of things I’m grateful for, at least one (and maybe three!) per day. Even things as seemingly simple as “I’m grateful I can see. I’m grateful I can walk around unassisted” are worth writing down. Those things we take for granted until something, G-d forbid, makes us acutely aware of how amazing it is that our body works the way it’s supposed to.

I’ve had a recent experience which let me tap into both these ideas, the silver linings thing and the gratitude for things I usually take for granted:

I got my DTap booster last Thursday, something that they give in the third trimester of pregnancy to help the protect the baby-to-be from pertussis, since the baby won’t be able to get immunized until I don’t know exactly when, but, you know, not immediately. One of the side effects is soreness in the arm which gets the shot.

Well, soreness doesn’t exactly describe what I’ve been experiencing. On Thursday afternoon, I could barely use my arm, it was so sore. I could hardly lift it and my range of movement was practically non-existant. This was inconvenient, to put it mildly, since I had been hoping to do some Shabbos cooking and now had to ask for assistance or at least move much, much more slowly to do things which otherwise I could do chick-chock.

And then when it came time to go to sleep, I couldn’t get comfortable. The pain and aching made it impossible to find a suitable position, and since I’m already at the stage where rolling over from one side to another takes a considerable amount of effort, being limited to the use of arm arm to move from here to there was very noticeable.

It made me think about the people who live with chronic pain and how all-consuming it must be. I am definitely taking my full range of motion less for granted as it has slowly returned! The silver lining of this situation is that this pain is the side-effect of something positive which will protect my baby from a nasty disease, and that we live in a country where this is something that is easily accessible.

In any case, one tip or trick to making sure that a feeling of inspiration stays is to plan for discrete actions, small things that are easily inserted into your daily schedule to act as reminders as the natural routine of life takes hold and the moment of inspiration fades into the distance. It will naturally recede, but it doesn’t have to disappear.

Photo by sydney Rae on Unsplash