The Most Important Thing Is Not To Fear

This is my last post of the week, and we are off to celebrate Passover and Easter with our respective families in LA (and do other really really cool stuff that I can tell you more about later).

But before I go, I wanted to wish all of my Jewish readers a happy Passover. Passover is the celebration of the liberation of the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt, and the time of year when we take time to personally reflect on ways that we feel in bondage in our own lives, and ways that we want to find and celebrate personal freedom. Thinking about all this has hit me really hard this year, as I face a myriad of Big Life Transitions in the next few months. How do I want to free myself from parts of my life that feel like bondage? How do I want to feel like my deepest, truest self heading into this new chapter of my life?

In a way, this meditation is the essence of what this site is about, because it's only nominally about weddings, really. I write APW because this community inspires me to live in a deeper, truer, and braver way - to live more deeply and richly. Weddings are a small microcosm of the way we live our lives: How do we express our values? How do we express our personal style? How to we balance embracing traditions that have value to us and rejecting cultural expectations that limit our growth? That is what this site is to me. Weddings are just the tip of the iceberg.

So for you, my dear Team Practical, I leave you with a Hebrew prayer that spoke to me this week as I thought about breaking free of bondage, and living more truthfully:

All the world is a very narrow bridge, and the most important thing is not to fear at all.
Kol ha'olam kulo gesher tzar me'od, v'ha'ikar lo lefahed klal.


Chag Pesach Sameach, dear readers! Think of freedom, taste it. I'll see you next week.