The war

The weather in Jerusalem that night in April was cool, some might say chilly. To anyone watching our hero walking quickly through the narrow corridors of the old city he seemed unaffected by the cold, when in fact he wished that he’d put on a sweater. And while approximately 1.6% of his brain was occupied with the question, “why didn’t I remember to put on my sweater before going outside?” the other 62.7% of his brain that was freed from the tedium of respiration and bodily function was occupied with one question:”what’s my purpose?”
That night, that nippy spring night, there was a war in our hero’s head. On one side, the army of transcendence: An army composed of the holy, the G-dly, and the righteous. On the other: the soldiers of practicality: stubborn, tough, battle hardened and ready to slog out the inevitable war of attrition. And so it went that night each side proposing a new road forward, a grand plan, a unified theory or some other such phrase that properly answered the all consuming question… It is a war that that every yeshiva boy, hippie, starving artist and Canadian football player is ultimately drafted into; either by choice, by economic cataclysm, or some other event that forces a period of introspection and self doubt.
On that night our hero had grown weary of bouncing around like a pinball through life... Settling in one place only long enough to leave a groove but never long enough to settle into it, he was beginning anew the very first process that we ever learn: choice. The first step of making that choice is to whittle down the competing theories until Ockham’s bloody razor is revealed and only then, when it is at its sharpest, slice away with its singularly sharp blade. That night, the war of attrition raging between our hero’s ears was favoring the stalwart and practical side; for each possibility cast aside as too base and spiritually bankrupt, the side of “reasonableness” leveled whole cities of theological pursuit… That is, until our hero touched the cold stone wall and remembered.