Courtesy of JewishSacredAging.com

Winter is the season of discontent. It may be that there are still weeks until baseball or the fact that I am looking out at more than two feet of snow here in the Philadelphia area.

Or, it may be that so many things seem to be a little out of balance in the world. Not quite the future we contemplated way back when, is it?

This is a time for many of us when we begin to ask the "why" questions of life. I call them the why questions because that is how I interpret Genesis 3, in which the issue of one's mortality is raised. (More of that in an upcoming column.) These why questions are the basis of life, I think, and they seem to be more present at this stage of our life.

Often, some event or life cycle issue will trigger the contemplative mode that gives rise to us asking these basic questions. One just hit me a few weeks ago as I flew home to officiate at a friend's funeral. He was just two years older than I am, and his death was sudden. What made it more devastating is that just one month prior, I had officiated at his daughter's wedding. The swift pace of life, its randomness, and the inability to control it were once again brought home.

The why questions really are quite simple: why was I born, why must I die, and why am I here? Simple, yes, but very complicated. We do spend most of our lives, in one way or another, wrestling with these questions. And, as we age, and time becomes more precious, these questions increasingly move from our unconscious mind to our conscious mind.

Curiously, you never know when these questions will pop up in our heads. I was sitting at a meeting recently, trying to pay attention, but my mind wandered, and these questions again emerged. As they did, a passage from an essay by Abraham Heschel also moved into consciousness. The essay dealt with the issue of our place in the world and our relationship with God. In the middle of the essay is this wonderful thought that the basic need of all of us is to be needed, and in that desire to be needed, is the search for our own sense of meaning.

Heschel makes a great deal about the fact that we are "creatures in search of meaning." Every one of us wants our life to stand for something, to mean something. We want to be needed by someone, and we need that connection because that connection helps define our sense of meaning in the world. That is why we create communities. That is why, in the end, it is family and relationships that win out over career and possessions. How many of us have looked into the eyes of our grandchildren, or been hugged by them, and realized that this is the real priority? How many of us have experienced illness and been supported and lifted up by community, friends, and family? How many of us have enjoyed a moment of honor or personal growth and had it made more delicious by the fact that we could share it with people we cared about and who cared about us? And how empty that triumph was when we were alone.

Simply, the point is that the relationships we have are the real glue of our life. Those relationships are what give texture and meaning to our existence and help each of us define how and why we can answer the "why" questions. So, cherish the relationships that you have, and be open to new ones that, no matter where we are in life, can help give added meaning to our own life. We need them.

Shalom.