Dreams, Pragmatism, and Knowing When To Jump

I hitched a ride to work today with an old family friend who is an A- level executive in the agency I am currently working in. He knows me from when I was a kid.

Apparently his division in the agency is expanding into psychiatric housing (due to complicated new laws and regulations regarding psychiatric patient care in New York State), and asked if I would be interested in moving laterally to his more permanent division from my year long grant funded division. The work would not be my dream job, but it is certainly closer than what I do now; it would probably come with a pay raise (how much I do not know), and it would be challenging and somewhat rewarding work - very unlike what I do now.

Considering that I joined this agency with the idea that I can run the rat race and move along, taking the opportunity the agency offered me and making the most of it, this seems to be a blessing, an opportunity, and certainly looks like an advancement career wise.

But, obviously, it is based in New York.

It has been my dream to live in Israel, much as people dream of marriage with a lover. I think that it is love which is the ultimate motivator for aliyah - love of G-d, love of life, love of the land which holds the two.

I also have life experiences of falling in love and watching pragmatics blow the relationship up. (I thank G-d every day for His steering me to my darling wife, who not only is my true love, but is the perfect partner for me as well.) Just because one's heart is on fire, one's soul yearns, one's life is bound up in another's, does not mean it is to be, or that it is the right time. Life has a funny way of shaping the road you're on to travel where you both want to go and need to be. The balance between the two is exquisite, and it is painful. And such is life.

Of course, I do not have an ironclad offer just yet. My current boss is able to block the interagency poaching if they so choose. I am more musing on what may be than worrying of what is. But faced between love on one side, and practicalities on the other; between a full and rich directed choice driven, and also struggling life and a provided for, more settled, but emptier, linearly and outside-defined life, where do you go?