Catching the Sundown Train

I received an email today from a self-described Author, Thinker and Life Enthusiast who purports to know how to find one's purpose in life. For starters, you should read his stuff. I tried and did not have any flash of insight, other than this: Nobody knows what the heck any of us are supposed to do here.

If anyone did know they would rule the world, or at the very least have their own TV show. Ditto anyone who knows what happens when we die, of if there is a God, or how the Universe began, or answers to any of the questions we all have, because we do all have them -- even the dummies who are happy to watch reality TV and join book clubs for the snacks but never read the books. They too have those unsettled feelings and odd longings roiling within, which they quell by shoving another slice of pizza down their gullets. If you are not of the pizza-shoving-down-gullet crowd, you might want to pay attention to the fact that tonight at sundown, the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur begins.

When I was a college student at NYU, my grandmother always worried that I would not get home in time for the big dinner she prepared before the fasting period began, cautioning me year after year to "catch the sundown train." If, after shoring up with a surfeit of calories as dusk falls, you fast for 25 hours and pray a lot and atone for all of your sins committed during  the last year, you can start out with a clean slate and have your name entered into God's Book of Life, where it will remain until next Yom Kippur. Such a deal!

Generously, you don't even have to be Jewish for this to work. Read up about it and consider taking the Yom Kippur Challenge; at the very least you will lose a couple of pounds. I plan on doing it in conjunction with the month-long Wheat Grass Challenge I have embarked upon with a friend, whereby a glass a day of the foul-tasting stuff will allegedly reverse my cataracts. We shall see---no pun intended.