“What day is it?” asked Pooh
It’s today,” squeaked Piglet.
My favourite day,” said Pooh.” ― A.A. Milne

The Jewish festival calendar ensures that we create rituals and safeguard days which take us out of ordinary time, out of our routines and regular activities. These are days which we create for ourselves in order to make a perspective on our lives that we are rarely able to see. Shabbat is the most regular such day, a day where the business and busyness of ordinary life is put aside for 25 hours. But we also have an extended period of time to dig deeper, reflect longer, consider not just the immediate week gone by and the week to come, but the life gone by and the life to come – the period of the Yamim Noraim, the Days of Awe. And these extend from the beginning of the month of Elul, right up until Hoshanah Rabbah.

Most of the time we live our lives carelessly, always looking forward or else living in the past, hoping or rehearsing or editing our lives. We rarely notice the present moment, and this tendency not to be fully present in the moment is made easier, as we view important events in our lives through the lens of our camera phones, or remain connected to our technology instead of paying full attention to our surroundings or to the people we are physically with. And we are able to distract ourselves with the activities of others, rather than take the time to give ourselves our full attention.

And then comes Elul, and Rosh Hashanah, leading into Yom Kippur and even through to Succot, nudging us to reflect, to notice – reminding ourselves to stop, to look and listen, to pay attention to the needs of ourselves and our world.

Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav the 18th Century Hasidic master whose short life (he died aged 39) was filled with spiritual teaching and thinking, reminds us of how important it is to do this, writing: “All we have in the world is the day, and the hour where we are, for the morrow is an entirely different world”.