First Things First

​That sounds reasonable enough. But how do we discern which things come first? Okay, in everyday affairs, it’s fairly simply. Take today. When my wife and I awoke this mid-January Saturday in our Boulder, Colorado home, the phone revealed that it was -11 degrees Fahrenheit outside. About three nighttime inches of snow covered the ground, our car, and everything else. We had to go to the hospital lab for Cedar’s fasting blood test. The Tesla was charged but needed remote heating and of course scraping. So first we got dressed, making sure that we had plenty of layers to protect us from the arctic incursion. I took my morning gout pills with a slice of Moroccan-style bread and goat cheese. Then, after clearing the snow from the car, we drove slowly but surely to the Boulder Community Hospital. The weather guaranteed a close-in parking space, plus the lab technician took Cedar right away. By 10 we were at the Walnut Café for a delicious breakfast, and we easily made our 11 a.m. water fitness course at the local YMCA. The order of events was more or less set in stone. First this, then that.

​In life’s larger domains, however, things are not so simple. Should one go from high school straight to college? What about a gap year or even a few years of work and travel? Then there’s the matter of one’s high-school sweetheart? How can or should that relationship evolve in the competing mix of things to do and places to go? Then what about a major, a job, a life partner, a life?
Perhaps there’s a hint in nature. Take toddlers, for example. They seem at first to learn mainly from themselves, which, by the way, is the literal meaning of “intuition.” They create games, dream up songs, babble contentedly or not to themselves, and twirl around the room in a yet-to-be-named dance. Of course, soon parents, siblings, caregivers, and the things around them begin to have an impact, and gradually learning from within, their first developmental thing, is replaced by a second stage of learning from without. If we are lucky, this inner-GPS, if you will, continues at a lower level of importance into our adult years. But generally, the impact of the big world out there seems to take priority as our head struggles to guide us safely and successfully through life’s demands, often at the expense of our bodies, hearts, and spirits. The act of balancing these inner needs in the face of outer material demands moves to center stage as we improvise the play of our life.
The first two words of the Hebrew Bible are, transliterated, bereshit adonoi, “in the beginning, God….” The idea is that the Creator comes before all of that entity’s creations, both literally and figuratively. We are by definition afterwards, in the present moment, and (in this form anyway) temporary. Thus we need to discern if we are a spiritual reality having a material experience or a material reality having a spiritual one. (Dial an inner 911?!) Once we decide that, it may help us know, moving forward, which things in our lives ought really to come first.

“In the Beginning, God..."