Hopscotch, Anyone?

One of the things I miss most about being a little girl is scampering around on the playground. I soared down that slide like nobody’s business and more than once – 3 times to be exact – fell off the monkey bars, tearing open my chin. I even have the scars from the stitches to prove it. But the freedom I felt there was unparalleled and, as I recall, well worth the wounds, though my mother might not agree.

Hopscotch was one of my favorite playground activities, in great part because it was something I was good at. Who knew then, in my innocence, that it would provide the perfect metaphor for my adult life? From this vantage point, it seems that grownup time is marked less by months and years than it is by the jump from one intense period to the next, with only rare chances to set both of my feet on the ground.

And just as it was on the playground, real life hopscotch is best played with others. To share the intensities in our lives – the big challenges, the blessed celebrations, and the lifecycle events that merit space in the shul bulletin – is to fortify our friendships. It gives us the platform upon which we perch everything else – the birthday gatherings, the Shabbos meals, the quick calls to see if the other needs something from the market.

In friendship, what’s yours is mine and what’s mine is yours. We hop with an open heart between one another’s milestones. We dance arm in arm in celebration, send lasagnas back and forth in crisis, and mourn together in loss. We do the hard stuff for one another because we want to. It is way more than a tenet of the social contract. It is the gift of balance in an unbalanced world.

Wounds make their mark too frequently, not only on the news, but in our own communities and in our own lives. They come in all shades of black and blue, from the sad to the tragic, from the irrevocable to the sorts that will, over time, heal themselves. If we’re smart, we learn the lessons to dance harder at a simcha and to savor simple, everyday pleasures.

We aren’t on the playground anymore, and we know well enough that we’re rarely handed the chalk and given the chance to draw the squares on the pavement by ourselves. Instead, life unfolds on its own: our parents age, our children G-d willing grow up and move on to the next wonderful stage of their lives, wrinkles form, some of our parts begin to sag. All the while, we hop from the highs to the lows and back up, and then back down again, because that’s what there is.

When the rare period of calm comes, short-lived though it may be, we should grab on tight. It’s a good time, within those lulls, to be grateful for the comfort we get from the people we love, and in the simple knowledge that we’re not hopping around alone.