I've had a couple of run-ins with excuses throughout my life, and a few more came this week. Earlier this week I had an "epiphany" of sorts about excuses and a conversation I had this shabbos when I was talking to one of my friends in shul kind of put it all together. He had said that his wife took their kids to New York a little while ago so he had to make sure he got to every minyan on time while they were away so that he could maintain the excuse that getting his kids up and ready in the morning was his reason for being late.
This isn't the first time this week that this occurred to me, but I realized that excuses are really just excuses. They aren't the real reason for something, they are just your way of getting out of trouble. Steven Covey establishes the first of his 7 habits of highly effective people as being proactive in one's decision making. He says that you have to realize you are responsible and that means you are response-able, able to choose your response to any given situation. To use an excuse is to say that you were not in control; you did not have the ability to respond as you chose. And we all know that that just isn't true.
We are coming into Elul this week and we all know the idea that the first step in doing teshuvah is charata, regret. I think that in this day and age that isn't really the first step. The first thing we have to do is make up our minds to admit that we are response-able. We can't go into Elul thinking that things aren't up to us. Feeling regretful for your actions while refusing to acknowledge that you had control over them is not regret at all. You may feel sorry about the outcomes but you don't feel at fault.
Before Elul even begins, and before the teshuvah process starts, make up your mind to realize that every decision you made in the last year was your choice. You were and still are response-able. You made those decisions and you have to live with that reality. Once you can do that you can start to regret the ones that didn't pan out as you would have liked.
This isn't the first time this week that this occurred to me, but I realized that excuses are really just excuses. They aren't the real reason for something, they are just your way of getting out of trouble. Steven Covey establishes the first of his 7 habits of highly effective people as being proactive in one's decision making. He says that you have to realize you are responsible and that means you are response-able, able to choose your response to any given situation. To use an excuse is to say that you were not in control; you did not have the ability to respond as you chose. And we all know that that just isn't true.
We are coming into Elul this week and we all know the idea that the first step in doing teshuvah is charata, regret. I think that in this day and age that isn't really the first step. The first thing we have to do is make up our minds to admit that we are response-able. We can't go into Elul thinking that things aren't up to us. Feeling regretful for your actions while refusing to acknowledge that you had control over them is not regret at all. You may feel sorry about the outcomes but you don't feel at fault.
Before Elul even begins, and before the teshuvah process starts, make up your mind to realize that every decision you made in the last year was your choice. You were and still are response-able. You made those decisions and you have to live with that reality. Once you can do that you can start to regret the ones that didn't pan out as you would have liked.
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