It’s a little embarrassing but maybe more funny than embarrassing so ...

The other day I went to bring a package to a nice lady who lives a few streets up the hill from me. We’ve known each other for years.

She was very happy to receive the package from abroad. We chatted about life about how hard it is these days to find the right shidduchim about today’s crazy prices about where the world has gone to. …

Then she goes into her little drawer in the bookshelf and takes out twenty-five shekels for me to pay back the person who sent the package.

She continues talking and I not wanting to interrupt continue to keep eye contact while rummaging for my wallet in the pocketbook on the table. She keeps talking but she’s giving me kind of strange looks.

Meanwhile I can’t find my wallet. I check to see why it’s so hard and realize that it’s not my pocketbook — it’s hers. Mine was still on my shoulder.

Of course she knows I’m not a pickpocket and it was totally embarrassing. (Though it goes to show how easy it is to make mistakes and look in the wrong places for what we need.)

One of my pet intriguing thoughts to think about is why people find themselves in whatever “pocket” they may be in usual or unusual.

Why is it that someone has to freeze and eat raw fish in Antarctica while someone else runs around barefoot in Thailand?

Does a person can a person somehow pick his or her “pocket” in the world in life? Or is this one of the predestined variables a person’s given as Rav Dessler writes about? Do those variables can those variables be changed according to our choices?

There’s this video game. The teams and players are set according to the program yet each time a player makes a certain move the entire program changes and the position of each player changes too.

Was Yosef supposed to sit in jail? Were we destined to go down to Mitzrayim?

Seems so.

But once we’re in our “pocket” how we stay how we try or don’t try to get out how we react once we’re out is where the “Free Choice Zone” comes into play.

We’re supposed to always remember how Hashem took us out of Mitzrayim. Why? One reason is because it reminds us that our purpose in the world is to break free of our straits (Mitzrayim means “straits”) to escape whatever constrains or confines us spiritually. These could be outer circumstances or inner limitations or both.

Did we cause these “straits”” Did we pick these “pockets” that we’re in? Were they predestined? Maybe. But either way we’re here in them now. So what’s to do?

A friend of mine lived in a beautiful spotless white and shiny house. One day for whatever reasons they had to sell it. She rushed to find a new place. And she found a place — with a beautiful door and shiny new floors. Only there were no windows. It was like a hole under the ground.

When I went to visit her I said “What an amazing door! What shiny new floors!”

She said “A person doesn’t live in a doorway.”

I saw that she had no air and no light and that the air of joy and light in her eyes had gone out. And I cried when I left.

Recently she moved. Baruch Hashem to a nice shiny airy white clean place. When I visited her she confided “In that place where we lived before I cried every day and night. And Hashem heard me. Out of the blue they told us we had to move.”

I had a situation recently where I was looking forward to a particular something that I’d been working on with a particular person. The day came when we were to hear the great news that we were going to move forward — but instead I heard the earth-shattering news that they were going forward but they’d decided they were going alone.

Wow did I have a field day picking out every negative trait about this person who in fact is very dear and close to me.

Between heart palpitations from the shock my thoughts pumped: How selfish uncaring greedy… You name it.

I take a long walk around the block.

Two walks.

After three long walks I go home and say Tehillim. Tehillim repeats the message that everything is for the best.

I start to calm down.

That person calls. I try to be cold but it’s not my forte.

I search for a way to get out of the straits.

Rav Shlomo Freifeld’s words come to the rescue.

Once one of the Rav’s daughters was confused. How could she celebrate a particular simchah when a tragedy had just taken place?

The Rav told his daughter “A Jew has many pockets in his heart.”

A well-trained thief is expert at finding valuables hidden in the pockets. He knows that just because a person might have old soggy breadcrumbs in his left pocket doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have valuables in the other. His job is to keep trying.

Chazal say “We should learn from every creature.”

Even the pickpocket.