Finding Myself

by Lloyd B. Abrams

I would love to claim that I find my essential self while davening in shul. But I can’t, because for one, I attend shul only when I have to.

But I do find myself when I’m in “the zone” which I can get to only when I’m engaged in certain physical activities. These days with beta-blockers – high blood pressure medication – it takes at least fifteen minutes to get up to speed while riding my recumbent bicycle.

The zone. When it happens, it’s exquisite. Everything’s in synch. My breathing is in rhythm with my pedaling, with my pace. I’m on a different plane, my own planet. I’m freed, liberated. My mind wanders but stays inside.

I know it’s drug-induced. Oxytocin is wonderful. Endorphins are wonderful. The feeling of chemically-enhanced well-being is my spiritual uplift.

I got into the zone more often when I was running, which I stopped doing after having arthroscopic surgery on my left knee. Then, I had the roads and paths all to myself. When I’m on my bike, I have to focus on external stimuli, like the increasing amount of traffic on suburban Long Island, like once glass-smooth roads that are now glass-strewn and more poorly-maintained than ever. But it does happen, sometimes, when I’m on a straightaway on Peninsula Boulevard that hasn’t yet been chewed up.

I used to run after I got home from my urban high school. One day, I was particularly disturbed by what had happened at work. I felt boxed-in by some bureaucratic craziness we had to endure. After stretching, I got out on the road. I knew that if I hadn’t worked through “it” by the end of a run, I was in trouble emotionally. After the third or fourth mile, I still hadn’t gotten into my equilibrium. The fifth mile passed. But during the sixth mile, returning north towards home on the path along Milburn Creek, a word – a word from God, perhaps – came floating, almost whispered, into my head. That word was sabbatical. Sabbath. Shabbat. Sabbatical. And I started smiling for the first time that day – a wide, joyous smile. I began striding into another realm of being.

I was alone when I got home. It was just as well for I got into a flurry of activity. Still in sweat-soaked clothes, I found my union contract, read and reread the pertinent chapter, called the UFT office, figured out what I had to do, and by that Friday, the deadline, applied for a one-year sabbatical at seventy percent pay.

It was a time for renewal, a time for finding out some crucial details and weaknesses about myself. I wrote stories and took scheduled and independent-study classes at Empire State College in Old Westbury. It was as if life was breathed into me.

The following fall, I returned to teaching and programming my school recharged and rejuvenated. But like all good things, the sabbatical honeymoon came to an end. For me, it was during staff development meetings on Election Day when the district superintendent was booed by an audience-full of my fellow math teachers.

How high things had been. How low things could go.

– Based on a prompt from the Writer’s Beit Midrash, Skirball Center May 2, 2011

Rev 2 May 16, 2011

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May 2011…Copyright © 2011, Lloyd B. Abrams