*Anchors in Reality | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | May 1, 2026*
This week, several Facebook groups shared posts asking the same question: “What was a chore we had as kids that children today don’t know of?”
These posts gathered thousands of responses.
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For example:
Bringing chalk from the school office.
Searching for a phone number for long minutes in the Yellow Pages.
Covering the computer to protect it from dust.
Getting up to lower the volume on the TV. Someone wrote that their role at home was to be the “remote control.”
Writing down phone messages for parents and telling them who called.
And sometimes also at what time.
Rewinding cassette tapes.
And of course, fixing the cassette tape ribbon with a pencil when it got tangled.
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Reading the responses, I remembered how my friend Chen and I sat for several consecutive afternoons after school, for hours each day, copying by hand entire paragraphs from an encyclopedia for an assignment we had to submit on “Ancient Synagogues in Israel.” The teacher allowed us to prepare it together but did not allow us to submit one shared assignment. So we had to copy every page twice. Photocopy pictures of ancient synagogues. Cut them out and glue them onto the correct pages. If you made a mistake, you copied the whole page again.
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On the final page, we had to add a map of Israel with the ancient synagogues marked.
We did that by tracing from an atlas onto parchment paper.
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By the end of that week, we hated all the ancient synagogues in Israel. Our hands hurt. I think we even fought and didn’t speak for a few days. It was boring and exhausting. And yet this week, out of all my childhood memories, this is the one I remembered with affection.
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That is, this movement - endless handwriting. Copying. Cutting. Gluing.
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These posts stirred a wave of nostalgia in thousands of people this week, and immediately the familiar debate began: was it really simpler and better once, or do people in every generation tend to romanticize the past, imagining it as better and simpler?
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Or maybe it’s the war? Maybe we simply long for days when what exhausted us was not bombs and similar threats, but figuring out how to record a song from the radio without the host talking over it?
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Personally, I don’t tend to glorify the past, and still, even I felt a sense of longing.
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But it wasn’t longing for working with heavy encyclopedias, not for rustling parchment paper, and certainly not for ancient synagogues in Israel. It was a different kind of longing, the kind you feel in the body itself. My body longed to be there. And the more I thought about it, I understood: it longs for its familiar movements. Movements I forgot amid the rapid changes of the world. But the body did not forget.
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My mother used to say sometimes that her body “misses its own movements.” And I still feel this today when we travel for long periods outside of Israel and then return home. There are places more comfortable than this home, more beautiful, more peaceful. But at home, my body remembers its own movements.
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And now I remember the kibbutz nursing home, where we used to visit our grandfather Yaakov every week, and how around the table sat other elderly kibbutz members who, even in wheelchairs or seated at the dining table, continued with the movements their bodies remembered and knew: one would keep polishing and cleaning whatever she could. Another would screw the chair’s armrest in and out. Someone played an invisible piano with his fingers, without keys and without a piano.
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So this week I thought a lot about the movements of our bodies, the ones through which they recognize themselves, know they are home. I thought about the movements that slipped away from us without even saying goodbye - like inserting film into a camera, or adjusting the antenna on top of the TV so the screen wouldn’t be snowy. And I thought about the movements we create, our new movements.
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At first, it was a slightly sad thought. Technology has distanced me from so many movements I loved: cutting and gluing, writing with a pen, flipping pages, touching cassette tapes or discs, touching paper, fabric, ink, thread. And in general, this week - out of memories of paper and parchment and tapes - I realized that the main material I come into contact with for hours every day, for years now, is the one my keyboard is made of - what is the keyboard beneath my fingers made of?
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According to ChatGPT, it’s made of hardened plastic, a matte anti-grease coating, and of course quite a bit of dust, dead skin cells, and plenty of bacteria.
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But the sadness passed when, through that same keyboard with its plastic and coating and bacteria, I opened Zoom - it was Sunday morning - and the screen filled with my community of writers and learners, and tears actually rose in my eyes. This too is a movement in the world. It is a movement of many people together in the world. I return here every week. Almost a full year now of writing together as a community - here too, my body recognizes itself.
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And so, before anything else, I told everyone how remarkable we are, that we do this, again and again, week after week, movement after movement, setting anchors in our own reality, insisting on them. I’m not sure they understood where this emotional speech came from, though I did see a few heads nodding. And maybe they did understand. After all, many of them continue to show up here, season after season, and begin to recognize themselves through the movement of writing, of thinking.
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What a thing it is to create movements for yourself consciously. Anchors in reality. And within the general chaos that has been our lives in recent years, to create places in your daily life where you recognize yourself.
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And I’ll end with a poem from my book Wherever We Float, That’s Home, which deals with the movements we once had in the world, and its rapid change without us noticing:
*We Return From the Sea / Maya Tevet Dayan*
Our feet were stained with tar. The world
was yellow and its edges burnt.
The sky, the earth and the air were an ear
and we had so much to tell.
At home, my mother’s skin was still warm
and smelled sweet from coconut, from the sun,
from the water and from being alive.
The tar disappeared. The stains disappeared. The memory
of the stains. We didn’t even notice. The sky
straightened out its edges and grew white.
Life spread out flat and wide.
We are left with feet that are always clean
and never say a thing.
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And if you feel like creating a movement of inspiration, learning, and writing with me - in our bodiesy and in the world - I invite you to join the community of my the Season of Inspiration. Registration for the summer season opens today, right now, and the season itself will begin in June. How much we all need to return our movements to ourselves after these past months. You are warmly invited.
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Wishing all of us a peaceful and quiet weekend,
*Maya Tevet Dayan*