Prepent 5774: Day 27, Making a Wish

Journey into the High Holidays with Amichai Lau-Lavie, founder of Storahtelling and the spiritual leader of Lab/Shul. It’s a daily dose of inspiration to get you focused and ready for the new year, featuring daily intentions, simple tasks, and tools for living better.

Make a wish for a new year. We do it for birthdays, with candles blown out, but for the birthday of the new year, we do it differently. Beyond making wishes for ourselves, along with resolutions and commitments, we wish each other something significant, as meaningful and magical as possible—something we hope will really come true.

The one-size-fits-all Shana Tova is great, and wishing goodness upon others is indeed a blessing, but how about creating custom-made new year wishes for a few special people this year? When I was a kid I used to make cards by hand. Personalized collages and artwork for family and friends, mailed or hand delivered in the days before the new year. My mother still keeps some on a shelf.

These days, email makes it easier to mass produce. And that’s okay, but what about really ‘making’ a wish—articulating it in words and images and sending it to just a few of the many people in your life. Everybody appreciates that personal touch. Even if we can’t do this for all the people in our life, choose a few that stand out and represent the different areas of your life.

Prepent Day 27: With one day to go before the new year, consider creating and sending three personalized messages today wishing special people a very special and specific set of blessings, wishes, hopes. Sending one more general to everybody else is perfectly lovely too.

Here’s mine to all of you: Try New Things!

I designed it with many of you in mind, and a sincere wish for each and every one of us, in our own unique way. Many thanks to the talented Mysh, a dear friend I have made in this past year, for translating my concept into design.

Make wishes, not war.

Follow along with the Scroll’s daily Prepent series here.