“You have one hour to write something profound” does not seem to be working on me.
I have been actively trying to be less productive, which I’m either succeeding in, or it’s absolutely counterproductive in that I am working more furiously on working less.
In an effort to enjoy my life I have been letting myself play solitaire on my phone when I know I don’t have deadlines, to sleep in on my days off, and to not write when I don’t have anything to say.
As it turns out though, I only have things to say when I make space for them to turn up out of the corners of the room, and with no space for thinking or adulting, it’s dust bunnies and laundry goblins running around over there.
Two weeks ago, I subbed all the classes I like to take and ended up desperate for someone to tell me what to do with my body. And so, scraping the bottom of the barrel of options for a girl in the rain at noon and without a car, I bought the two-week intro special at the yoga studio down the street from my apartment. A place I’d been ignoring for two reasons - one, I have a hard time paying for things I get for free, and two, I did not know where the entrance was.
I wish I could tell you, dear reader, about the transformative power of these classes or the magical teachers I found there, but alas, they were, as most of us are, lovely but common. What I did find, what I didn’t realize I needed so well, was a complete and utter aloneness. An invisibility cloak, weighty and warm. With pockets.
While I wouldn’t trade the studios where I teach - where I have connections and a sense of community - for anything, there is something whole and necessary about being a mystery and a non-entity somewhere in the world. A place with no expectations or qualifications or small talk, where no one knows your name. An inverted “Cheers.” Too much of anything is a discomfort, and I realize how bizarre it may seem to want to disappear into the incense smoke of the ether, since the root of most troubles is not being seen in the first place, but imagine, if you will, what happens when things are unfamiliar.
The gold wall on the west side of the room? It looks like the south wall of the old Back Bay Yoga with the railing, where I liked to put my mat by the windows and watch the snow in the winter. I went on my days off from bartending when my feet felt like they had been transplanted from a corpse and I had to train them to be live feet once again.
That song at the beginning of class? I heard it once in class in New York, at the place I used to plop my stuff right when I got into town. And again at my neighborhood studio in Chicago where I would practice on Sunday mornings no matter what, and often at the expense of sleep and exciting plans. When my hair smelled like cigarettes because you could still smoke in public and my life was full of bar shifts, angst, and Febreze.
I can hear the rain through the windows and the sound of the street and I miss you and I’m sorry I didn’t send that email back but I don’t know what to say and I don’t know if I would recognize all of those types of me if I walked by them today.
Something is new so we throw it next to something else and compare it. We categorize it, fill in the blank spaces with something we know. And what I think I know is so strange and muddied up and full of memories I didn’t remember until there in the corner is Kali with half an arm and suddenly I am bubbled over with the scent of a man I thought I loved for a few months in the cold.
Here in the corner by the window I train my heart to be a live heart once again, I guess.
I have things to say and I have to force myself to find them, peeking out from under the pile of dirty clothes and half-finished projects, and I think it might take more than an hour.