Sleep when you're dead...

Sometimes I say to Sig Other, “ugh, I’m so tired – I have to sleep.”  And to this he says, “Sleep?  I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”  I never knew what he meant until I heard a rabbi tell the story of man with a bank account.  In that account, he received a credit of $84,000 every morning.  And by the end of every day that $84,000 was gone whether he spent it or not.   He never knew if more money would come the next day and so he worried about spending any of the $84,000 lest it not come again the next day.  But the money didn’t stay in his account.  Whatever was deposited in the morning disappeared by the end of the day.  And each day he got another $84,000.  He realized, over time, that the money would not accrue.  And the money would always disappear.  And so he came to understand that he should spend whatever was in his account and enjoy it while he had it.  It’s sort of like being in the desert with a jug of water.  The jug has a slow leak.  Every day it might get filled but there is no point in rationing as the water will have dried up by day’s end anyway.  So we should look at the hours of our day.  We get 24 fresh shiny new hours every single day of our lives.  Those hours do not accrue.  They do not carry over.  If we don’t squeeze every minute of possibility and life out of every single minute we have, then what is the point?  

Shabbat shalom.