Just Be
I have placed before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. So choose life in order that you may live, you and your descendants.
Deuteronomy 30:19
Sometimes it takes everything in us to choose life hour by hour just to get through the day.
My first encounter with the wisdom of Rabbi Abraham Heschel was when I saw these words of his painted on a little ceramic plaque in the boutique of a Benedictine monastery where I was on a retreat:
“Just to be is a blessing, just to live is holy.”
It felt like an opening to sacred ground, a balm for my feelings of never being enough.
But it also seemed like an impossibly far Promised Land.
I sighed with longing as I read those words and thought, I wish I could rest in that. I know it’s true for other people. I know their just being is a blessing. But I’m so lazy and unproductive! Are we really invited into that kind of rest? Doesn’t God want more from me?
At the time of that retreat, I was struggling with the fact that, even several years after finishing my doctorate, I had no scholarly publications while friends were publishing books left and right. My nonacademic friends were doing all kinds of other good work.
I felt like a fruitless lump in comparison.
I bought the little plaque to take home, feeling it might be an invitation from God.
That spring I had the semester off from teaching and hoped to get some writing done but was making little progress. One afternoon I got caught up in one of my usual self-shaming tirades about how unproductive I was.
At some point I paused and looked at the plaque with Heschel’s words.
“Just to be is a blessing, just to live is holy.”
I wondered — But, how can this be any sort of blessing?! All my friends are out there doing great work while I sit here rotting away in a depressed funk! There is nothing remotely good or holy about this.
My younger self might’ve floundered in that swamp for hours.
This time I tried to take a step back and reframe.
Well . . . what have I done today? I guess I got out of bed. I took my medication. Maybe I can give myself credit for that? Could be worse, right? It’s been worse before. But I’ve been taking my meds. I’m staying out of the hospital. Does that count for something?
And I’m doing this. I’ve been fighting like this . . . all these years. All the times I haven’t liked living at all, I’ve kept showing up.
So . . . what if I give myself credit for choosing “just to live” today, on this bare level? That’s a real fight for some of us — to show up and keep choosing “to be” at all! Could this count as part of a day’s work? Maybe God would see this and say, “Good enough, dear! This is what being faithful looks like today. You’re doing it.”
Describing life with schizophrenia, Esmé Weijun Wang points out that “chronic illness stitches itself into life in a different way than acute illness does. With chronic illness,” she explains, “life persists astride illness. . . . The absolution from doing more . . . during surgeries and hospitalization is absent during chronic illness.” And thus, the constant guilt.
It’s exhausting to have a “serious mental illness” like bipolar disorder. I mean, seriously.
But one positive aspect of having an actual diagnosis is the awareness that illness is involved, though it might be less visible and more stigmatized than other illnesses. So, even if no one else gets it, even if people feel let down by those of us with challenging mental conditions, perhaps we can offer ourselves this “absolution from doing more.” It’s real work we’re doing to stay in the fight.
Showing up “just to be” is not nothing, especially in the middle of a war against forces of self-annihilation.
If you’re overwhelmed in the day-to-day, it can help to simply focus on where you are in the present moment. Research in mental health has shown that how we feel emotionally is concretely tied to how we are in our bodies, and moving our bodies or slowing down with deep breathing can have a calming effect on our state of mind.
Take time to ground yourself in your body and your breath. In their book on Asian American trauma and mental health, Where I Belong, Soo Jin Lee and Linda Yoon offer wonderfully practical grounding exercises at the end of every chapter.
I sometimes practice breath prayers to slow my breathing and quiet frenetic thoughts when I’m feeling overwhelmed. Here are a couple I’ve liked:
Breathe in: Lord, have mercy.
Breathe out: Christ, have mercy.
Breathe in: Kyrie,
Breathe out: eleison.
Breathe in: Christe,
Breathe out: eleison.
We can give ourselves credit for taking this one aching breath.
And the next.
And the next.
Breath by breath.
I think that counts as choosing life.
If it’s all you can do, just be.
“Just to be is a blessing, just to live is holy.”
What would it be like to grow into the truth of these words?
Adapted from “Christ in the Abyss: Cultivating Deep Faith amid Depression and Despair” by Jean L. Neely, Ph.D., from NavPress in June 2026. Breath prayers from Jon Fosse’s “Septology,” trans. Damion Searls (Transit Books, 2019),
