Mattot- Masa'ei: Remembering the Journey

From Rabbi Shai Held's "Serving God in All We Do, at https://www.hadar.org/torah-resource/serving-god-all-we-do#source-3749
The text serves to remind us that even seemingly inconsequential stops on our journey can be powerful opportunities for serving God.
. . . Where is God to be found and served? When I am praying, only in prayer; when I am studying, only in study; and when I am engaged in acts of kindness, only in those very acts. But Kook goes further. My eating can be holy—and not just because it enables me to study or contemplate. Shopping for groceries, or talking to my children, or any one of a myriad other things I have to do in a given day—all of these activities can be holy, provided I am truly inside them, fully present as I do them. Returning to our verse from Proverbs, Kook emphasizes not just that we can know God in all our ways (be-khol), but that we can know God in (be-khol) all our ways. As he puts it, “the bet is a bet that means ‘within,’ that through the very essence of these ways one comes to know God.”5

From David Foster Wallace, "This is Water" at https://fs.blog/2012/04/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/
. . .traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is. . .
. . . If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.

From Rebecca Solnit's Hope in the Dark
"Memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair," the theologian Walter Breuggeman notes. It's an extraordinary statement, one that reminds us that though hope is about the future, grounds for hope lie in the records and recollections of the past. We can tell of a past that was nothing but defeats and cruelties and injustices, or of a past that was some lovely golden age now irretrievably lost, or we can tell a more complicated and accurate story, one that has room for the best and the worst, for atrocities and liberations, for grief and jubilation. A memory commensurate to the complexity of the past and the whole cast of participants, a memory that includes our power, produces that forward-directed energy called hope...
Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension...