By Rabbi Rachel Esserman 

“Life is what happens when we are doing the best we can.” That was the one thing I said during a home hospice visit that seemed to emotionally affect the relative to whom I was speaking. He had been talking about all the things he would have done differently the past year if he had known how close his parent was to death. I’m not sure where the words came from since I don’t recall thinking or saying them before, but he was not the only person affected by them.
As I drove home, I thought of all the times I’d done the same thing: thinking that if I knew then what I know now, I would have done things differently. Of course, hindsight is easy: we know the result of our actions. But we can’t guarantee if we had done something different that life would have been better. There might have been other problems or other difficulties that arose from those actions. We have to give ourselves credit for doing the best we can with what we do know.
This was not the first time when acting as a chaplain that I’ve thought I should take some of my own advice. For example, when encouraging one individual to focus on the positive things happening to him, I noted that he should think good thoughts – that today will be a good day because (fill in the blank with whatever positive thing is happening that day). As a person whose basic nature is to focus on the negative, that’s good advice for myself, but it’s so hard to do. I’ve written before about how I relate to the characters in the Winnie-the-Pooh stories: I am a negative Eeyore who wants to be a very positive Tigger.
Yet, when running a business like The Reporter, there are times when it pays to think of the worst possible scenario so that I can be prepared if it happens. My family used to laugh at me when I planned ahead for things to go wrong. However, that more easily allows me to change my plans, something at which I am not good. When I lived outside of Philadelphia during rabbinical school, I would say that making only one mistake traveling somewhere meant it was a perfect trip. That way I was prepared for the mistakes I did make and didn’t feel disappointed when they occurred.
However, it is far more difficult to do this when it comes to our personal life. If only, I’d been less strict about that; if only I’d realized that didn’t really matter; if only I’d known that a pandemic was coming; if only.... I think the idea is clear. If we could predict the future, life would be so much easier. But we can’t: all we have to work with is what we know right this minute. All we can do is remember that “life is what happens when we are doing the best we can.” We can only hope and pray that is enough.