Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, begins tonight.  Unlike the secular New Year in January, Jewish New Year is celebratory but also contemplative.  It’s a serious holiday that requires participants to do a lot of soul-searching.  How did you live this past year?  Whom did you hurt?  What do you want to do differently this upcoming year?  Who needs an apology?  There’s 100% less champagne, and 100% more gut-twisting thinking.

And there is also beautiful ritual that weaves through the holiday into the following 10 days leading to Yom Kippur.  You get a little over a week and a half to contemplate who you are and who you want to be.  There’s a weight to that.

Lifehacker had a post about grief; how to help someone who is grieving.  It’s all good advice, mostly advice you already know.  But there was a part at the end that changed the way I see grief.  The therapist, Emily Adams,  interviewed in the article states:

She also said it’s important to remember that grief is a ritual. We get through it by participating in it. Yell on a mountain top, write a letter in the forest and bury it, cry in the sea. Let yourself express your loss so you don’t just have it sitting there inside you, unchanging … Your grief isn’t you. It’s just a part of your life.

Grief is a ritual.  We get through it by participating in it.  No one can grieve for you, and because the ritual is personal, no two expressions of grief look alike.

It’s not a thought that makes grief any easier, any more than knowing that the fasting on Yom Kippur is ritual makes your stomach growl less.  But it does allow for some space between the person and the feeling as well as an understanding of the point to the feeling; that we are trying to make sense and honour the space we’re in.

Maybe it just struck me because I read it before I’m about to enter multiple days of ritual, but it helped me to realize grief for what it is; something that is doing its hardest to help during a time period that only hurts.

We’re saying goodbye to a car this weekend.  Luckily, it’s going to people I love, so there’s a chance to see it again.  (Can you tell that I’m not really good with goodbyes?)  I am glad they are taking it because this is the car that we got a few weeks after the twins were born.  It’s the car that I drove them around in when they were infants.  The one where they’d throw their binky into the hatchback and then howl as we drove down the highway.  It’s the one where they crushed Cheerios against every surface.  Where we listened to hours upon hours of Dan Zanes.

It’s not really the car that I’m missing.  It’s the memories of the kids being infants.  It’s missing the baby years.  I don’t really want to go backwards to listening to them howl in frustration while we’re going 60 on the highway (seriously, why did they always toss their binky into the open trunk?), but I miss the quiet moments.  Wedging myself between their two car seats so we could do a double bottle feed.  The conversations we’d have as we took wrong turns.  I miss that.

It’s never really about the thing itself, but instead, all the memories that come with it.

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Stop procrastinating.  Go make your backups.  Don’t have regrets.

Seriously.  Stop what you’re doing for a moment.  It will take you fifteen minutes, tops.  But you will have peace of mind for days and days.  It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• None… sniff…

Okay, now my choices this week.

Dreaming of Diapers breaks down the concept of being happy… enough.  About being happy, even when parts of your life are not going as planned.  Being happy when you’re living out the “ever after” and it doesn’t look how you thought it would look.  And comparing happiness to other points in your life; are you happier now than you were then?  It’s a thought-provoking post.

Searching for Our Silver Lining is going through stress, and it’s affecting her mood.  She’s blue, and it isn’t one thing.  It’s just a lot of things all coming together at the same time.  It’s life at its sloggiest.  This post is about knowing that it won’t always be like this, but it’s hard right now. and you need to honour the “right now.”

Lastly, Bent Not Broken has a post about an exchange with a neighbour that got under her skin.  She writes: “I don’t write about this for sympathy, rather I write it to show that grief is not linear. This happened after a long period of doing really well, being confident, and fully embracing the life I’ve been given. And yet words, simple, innocent words, cut right through me.”  And that is precisely why I think this is an important read.

The roundup to the Roundup: Goodbye car.  Your weekly backup nudge.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between August 31st and September 7th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

I’m a middle child, and I’ve been lovingly teased my whole life about being a middle child.  But it didn’t occur to me until I read this article this summer that we don’t have a middle child in our family.  We have twins — two — and one is the oldest and one is the youngest.  The position I hold in my childhood family has been eliminated in our immediate one.

I don’t know many people with three children.  Most of our friends have somewhere between zero and two.

The article states: “The American Middle Child is now an endangered species. As the ideal number of children per family has shrunk to two — that’s not me speaking, it’s demographics — the middle child, in a very real sense, is disappearing.”  Today, two-thirds of women with children have one or two.  Not three or more.  Which means: “Middle children, the most populous birth-order demographic throughout most of human history, will soon be the tiniest.”

I don’t think birth order is the end-all-and-be-all, but I do think that where people fall in the family influences their personality a bit.  How can it not?  And if a position is eliminated, how does that affect the greater world?  I don’t think people should have more children just to keep middles around, but it is an interesting thing to think about.

Once you have a child, an oldest child exists.  Once you have a second, a youngest child exists.  But you have to keep going to create a middle.  We weren’t successful, maybe that’s why I’m drawn to thought-provoking articles like this.

Are you a middle child?  Do you think birth order means anything?

You know how there are people who can match the perfect wine to a meal?  That is not me.  I don’t drink wine, so I have no clue how to pair it.  But I am totally that way with books and my own brain.  I can’t do it for anyone else, but I am so good with holding books and then reading them at the right time.

Take, for instance, Us by David Nicholls.  I owned it for years, and I kept it by my bed for years because I didn’t want to forget to read it.  Every so often, I’d read the first page or two and think, “not yet.”

I read it while we were traveling through Scotland this summer.  Even though the family in the book exits the UK, they at least begin their travels in the UK.  Being away from home heightened my enjoyment of that book.  It was the best pairing I’ve done in a while between book and experience.

On the other hand, I’m planning to read Andrew Sean Greer’s Less while I’m at home.  It’s also a travel story, but instinct is telling me to read it from home, preferably in winter, though it technically could be enjoyed in any season.

I went back to the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy because they felt best consumed in summer, and it’s currently summer.  Though I just slammed shut and returned When Life Gives You Lululemons to the library when I was only a few pages in because I realized that it wouldn’t work for me in any location OR in any season even though I wanted to read the book.  I left a note to check back with my gut in a few months to see if I can find a place/time to read it, but… if not… I have to drop it.  There’s no life experience to pair it with that would work.

Can you read any book at any time, or do you hold certain books to read in a season or place?

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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After reading (and seeing) Crazy Rich Asians, I am devouring every article linked to inside other articles, and found this one about crazy rich honeymoon planners.  (Actually, it’s not that the honeymoon planners are crazy rich.  It’s their clients.  So I guess that moniker doesn’t really work.)

Anyway, $50,000 for a honeymoon!  Or more.  The minimum is $20,000 to use their services, and they talk about one that cost $1.8 million.  FOR A HONEYMOON.

We went on a great honeymoon.  We went to St. Lucia.  We had good intentions to explore and learn the patois, but we ended up face-planting on the beach and sleeping or reading every day.  We managed to head into a nearby town twice, catching a street fair one night, and we went on a hike (though quit early so we could go back to sleeping).

If you’re married, did you go on a honeymoon?  If not, where would you want to go?

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.