First and foremost: get rid of the piano.

Collingwood upright piano

How Do You Take the First Small Step?

For most of your "grown up" life, you have been dreaming of discovering the world, experiencing foreign adventures, and expanding your horizons. Now the moment has come. You are ready to embark on a journey. It might be just before settling down, before bringing a child into the world, or before focusing on a successful career. It could also be the moment you realize that if it doesn’t happen right now, it will never happen at all.

The decision to leave your familiar and beloved comfort zone and to put your current life behind you is, to say the least, a challenging one. Beyond all the emotions you experience, there are also many technical matters to address. You have the house you live in, whether it’s rented or owned by you, there’s the car that needs to be sold or stored, and depending on how long you plan to be away from your homeland, you may need to notify certain authorities about your time abroad. However, in my opinion, the most complex part is parting with personal belongings.

Someone said that God is in the details, and those details are the items and possessions accumulated throughout life. For me it was a piano. When I was young (and beautiful), I would sometimes play a harmonious progression or melody that was playing inside my head, and made me think I was quite talented. But then, for various reasons, I was convinced that I needed to learn formally, and several piano teachers insisted that we play Mozart, Ragtime, Bach, and Erik Satie. With a very serious face, one after another, they all told me that some people are born with a natural talent for playing the piano, but, unfortunately, I was not one of them. Well, the private lessons didn’t last long, and the piano, feeling slightly offended, rebelled, started singing flat, lost its muting pedal and turned into a tone deaf pain in the arse.

In preparing for my journey, it is clear that the piano definitely has to go. But who, in God's name, would want an old, dilapidated piano that can't be fixed, that no tuner wants to have anything to do with it, and that, on top of everything else, won't shut up?

Besides the piano, there’s also an orthopedic mattress with countless springs and layers of foam, a television that is never switched on 'cause who wants to watch an emerging dictatorship, books that have been read and won’t be read again, CDs that have no player, unnecessary clothes, and shoes that are rarely worn and, like the piano, just collect dust wherever they're left. And don't forget the kitchen utensils and the 18-piece dinner set, of which sixteen pieces haven’t seen the light of day since they were purchased, and so on, and so forth. How do you part with all these items? How do you decide what goes to charity, what is given to friends, what is sold, and what is thrown away?

We tell ourselves that these are just "things" made of simple materials that were assembled by machines into functional objects, and over time have absorbed our scent and our fingerprints and smudges. Despite repeatedly saying that we don’t care about "stuff", when the moment of truth comes to our doorstep, our diaphragm contracts, the upper crease in our forehead deepens, our three nether gates tighten to a knot, and altogether we feel quite unwell.

We do care. We care about our belongings more than we care to admit. We take a shoe out of the drawer and feel that if it’s thrown in storage or the trash, it will feel terribly hurt. Everyone will be insulted: the books, the CDs, the barely-worn clothes, and the piano... the piano that belonged to my grandmother and is one hundred and fifty years old, and has stood in every one of my rooms, patiently waiting for me to learn to play and love it. How can I part with that old tone deaf instrument?

As I look at my sweet piano, I close my eyes and focus on what is happening in my body. I scan it from my feet to my head. I notice pain in the joints of my big toes. From there, I feel a fishing line that seems to be threaded through all my lower bits, pulling them tight, and they, in turn, pull painfully at my lower back, which pulls on my diaphragm, causing it to tighten around my lungs. The fishing line wraps around my neck, reaching my furrowed brow, and finally ties itself to the previously mentioned nether cracks. Yes, hysteria resides in every part of me; I feel terrible, and in one second I'll be giving up on the entire journey.

“Breathe!” an inner voice commands.

I've been told that the constricted areas are patterns, and a pattern is created to avoid feeling fear. I am very unconvinced by this interpretation because I believe that the tightness, the pain, and the sense of faintness are, without a doubt, fear. So, the point is that it isn't. This knot is what is stopping me from feeling pure fear. The emotion of fear, as was explained to me, is simply a flow of energy that millenniums ago was created to save our lives. This golden energy that fear is made of, was created so we could run faster, climb easily to the top of a tree, and think more clearly so that we could outrun and out think the predator chasing us and survive.

The anxiety that I am experiencing now, as opposed to pure fear, freezes us, clouds our thinking, drains our strength, turns us into easy prey, and one can assume that before the prey (me) sells the piano, it will be eaten.

Okay. In the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit and the cherished journey, I agree to try everything. I relax my shoulders and my brow. I open all my vents. I relax my diaphragm muscle and air finds its way into my lungs, belly and even into my pelvis. A wave of heat washes over me, and my left eyelid is twitching.

It is frightening to part with the small objects that have defined who we were for so many years. It is even more frightening to embark on a journey embracing the question of self-definition. And we are not eager to feel fear. But fear is just fear, and when you allow it to shake your foundations, it ultimately protects you and gives us the strength to flow onward.

After several minutes of scanning, breathing, and relaxing, it suddenly seems that it is possible to rid myself of the piano. And here we are; I just took my first small step toward my great journey.

The things you must do before setting out on a world tour.

National Journal:

Protests against the judicial reform are taking place around the Knesset in the streets of Jerusalem. Photo: Fl aerial photography.

Translation: Mandelblit in a Sharp Attack: "We are Experiencing a Process of Regime Change"

The former legal advisor spoke at a national security research conference - INSS, and sharply

criticized the judicial reform promoted by the coalition: "Everything is contrary to Begin's path."

protesting in Jerusalem