My favorite verse in the entire Tanakh is Ecclesiastes 9:11:
“I have further observed under the sun that the race is not won by the swift, nor the battle by the strong, nor does bread belong to the wise, wealth to the intelligent, or favor to the learned; but time and mischance befall them all.”
On its surface, this may seem like a bleak outlook: time and mischance happen to all of us. Being fast does not guarantee that we will win the race. Being strong does not guarantee victory. Being wise does not guarantee success. There are simply things in life we do not control.
But taking a step back from this verse, I imagine a canvas.
The canvas has edges. There are confines to it. But within the confines of that canvas, there is extraordinary possibility. We have colors. We have brushes. We have tools. And each of us has been given a slightly different set. Our disposition is a brush. Our humor is a color. Our patience, our creativity, our resilience, the way we respond when something unexpected happens—these are the inspirations with which we paint.
Bob Ross famously called mistakes “happy little accidents,” and my art teacher growing up said each of us had an “artist’s license” with which we were liberated to express ourselves uniquely. Something unexpected appears on the canvas, and rather than wishing it away, the artist asks: What can I do with this?
Time and mischance happen to us all, sure. We don’t choose every circumstance, also true. We don’t get an infinite canvas.
But we do get to paint; we do get to choose how we respond to the canvas.
And perhaps a meaningful life is not one in which the canvas turns out exactly as we imagined. It is one in which we learn to use the colors we have, the brushes we have, and the time and space we have been given to create something that could only have been painted by us. To leave our mark.
If time and mischance happen to all of us, how will we spend the moments in between?
Moadim l’simcha!