I had a flat tire and I was happy

A Torah Anytime original series. [music] Yesterday I had a flat tire. Not the slow leak type, not a warning light for 2 months [music] type. The explosion type, the kind that forces you to pull over and crouch down and just stare at the wheel [music] like it personally betrayed you. And I'm sitting there for 2 hours waiting [music] for help, thinking, "Really? this today. But as I'm crouched there, something hits me that this isn't really about a [music] tire. It's about the way we move through life. Because every one of us eventually deals with flat tires in life. Every one [music] of us will inevitably deal with flooded basement and dead batteries and broken boilers and leaking roofs and that one thing that goes wrong that suddenly hijacks [music] your mood and your day and your perspective. And the sad thing is that we [music] sometimes let the one thing that isn't working eclipse the 99% [music] that is. We do this everywhere. Sometimes we get so focused on the one thing our child can't [music] do that we forget all the things that they can do, their kindness, their effort, their growth, their soul. Sometimes we get so caught up on the one small [music] thing that bothers us about our husband or our wife that we completely lose [music] sight of the other 99% of who they are. Warm, loyal, brilliant, funny, [music] loving. Sometimes we let one flat tire in life convince us that life is horrible and everything [music] stinks and everything is just filled with stress. when in reality most of the time our life is magnificent and sometimes [music] we need to just slow down a little to realize it. Judaism understood this about human [music] nature a very long time ago. Ever wonder why Hashem made people age? Why do people slowly lose energy over time? Ever wonder that? Why don't people have the [music] exact same energy of a seven-year-old until the day they die? Why somewhere around [music] our 30s do we slow down and we walk a little slower and we move a little slower and we [music] don't bounce back the same way that we did? Almost every other animal in the universe has the same level of [music] energy and health until right before it dies. Why is it not that way with humans? Well, believe it or not, [music] once upon a time it was like that with humans. The medish in Berius, [music] it says that for the first thousand years of world history, [music] human beings lived with the exact same youthful energy they had as a child [music] until the day that they died. So what changed? What changed was Avitz and Yakov realized that this isn't going to work. They realized that if we never slowed down in life, we would never stop to think. We would never [music] sit with our children or our grandchildren. We would never take stock of life. [music] We would never notice the million small, dazzling, beautiful things in life. We would spend our entire lives just running right past the million that Hashem wants us to notice. And so the mentor says that they did almost the [music] unthinkable. Aram introduced aging to the world. Davend [music] for suffering. Yakov introduced illness. that arthritis you have, you can blame Aram. [music] That lack of energy you have, you can blame Yitzluck and Yakov. Why in the world would they do that? The answer is that all three of us saw [music] the same danger. That if life moves too smoothly, if everything always works, if we have the energy of an 11-year-old in our 80s, if nothing ever slows [music] us down, we run the risk of missing the unbelievable happiness right in front of us. The smile of a grandchild, the warmth of a spouse, ficta and brilliance of the [music] tyra, the quiet miracles filling our days. So, Hashem placed builtin pauses into [music] life. Sometimes they look like aging. Sometimes they look like struggle. And sometimes they look like a flat tire on the side of a road. Not to break us, but to wake us up. [music] To remind us not to judge our lives by the one thing that's wrong, but by the overwhelming 99% [music] that's right. So, yes, yesterday my tire exploded and no, it wasn't [music] convenient and it was annoying. But today, I'm grateful it was just a tire. Grateful that 99% [music] of my life keeps running with Hashem's unimaginable, even when I forget to notice. And maybe that's the fire. Learning not [music] to let one broken wheel convince us we're living a broken life. Learning to see the blessing even when life sometimes taps the brakes.