Today, my husband was blessed with a very short workday. We took advantage of it to get out and enjoy a rare treat: coffee at our favorite local place. In Judaism, we bless God for the big things and for the little things, such as every bit of food or drink of which we partake.

Caffeine and sunshine, both worthy of blessing today.

#BlogElul, the brainchild of Rabbi Phyllis Sommer, invites participants to chronicle the month leading up to the Jewish High Holy Days through blog posts, photos, and other social media expressions.

I am a thinker. One could make a well-supported, cogent argument that I am an over-thinker, one who lives too much in her head and not quite enough in the world of action.

Confession time: I was already way overdue for an eye appointment and a dentist visit when the Navy moved us to Florida in March of 2013. A year and a half later, long after all the urgent upheavals of the move had settled into the routine (well, as routine as life ever gets with a Navy pilot for a spouse), I still had not managed to look up a new optometrist and dentist to call for appointments. Oh, I thought about it — frequently, in fact — but there always seemed to be something more compelling I could shove in front of it on the priority list.

I’ll do it later, I thought, and proceeded to throw up all kinds of excuses for why I needed to think about it more before picking some names from a list of covered providers and picking up the phone. I need to do research. I need to be sure our schedule is set. I need to… 

Today, goaded by the blog prompt’s exhortation to “act,” I pulled the dreaded task of phoning strangers off my mental back burner and made the calls. I now have appointments. Done. More than that, a chunk of my brain’s proverbial clock cycles were suddenly freed up. What I had thought was a low-priority task waiting to be done was actually a mental resource hog that had been taking up energy for so long that I had ceased to notice it.

In the new year, I want to be more aware of the difference between thinking about things because they need thinking about and thinking about things as a way to “deal” with them without taking any concrete action. Thoughtless, impulsive action is no help to anyone, but then, neither is overthinking a simple task to the point of paralysis.

#BlogElul, the brainchild of Rabbi Phyllis Sommer, invites participants to chronicle the month leading up to the Jewish High Holy Days through blog posts, photos, and other social media expressions.