Once upon a time, I slept on the floor and ate frosting for dinner and only went to the five dollar yoga classes because I made a decision and got on a plane and did not think any of it through.
It took me four months to get a bed, and longer to break the frosting habit, but the five dollar classes remained my favorite practice spot.
I’ve been in a rut this year. Two years, maybe, I can’t tell much difference between 2015 and 2016 except for the month and a half I was in LA.
When I traded Chicago for Boston I had this feeling that my life was going on somewhere else without me and if I could just get to that place, I could jump into it. Like a ski lift.
That was 2011.
2012 was when I got sick over Christmas and broke my rib.
2013 was the Marathon Bombing and the Red Sox won the Series.
2014 I have blocked from my memory.
The beginning of 2015 was six feet of snow and two feet of restlessness.
And after that things start to bleed together. My parents’ friends tell me this is what happens when you get older. That the years weave. I refuse to believe that there is an age where you begin to paint your time beige and call it a life.
2016 is the year I lived in California for a little bit, and partly because I wanted to call it that. Paint March green and live a little more.
I said it was becoming difficult to find classes I wanted to take when I came back. To learn things. To move enough.
I got in trouble for that.
Would you rather be a big fish in a small pond, or a small fish in a big pond?
A big fish in an ocean, I said.
The big fish, the five dollar teachers, they mostly moved away. Gone to paint in green and hot pink and seafoam blue.
There are always valleys in the lifetime of a practice. And it’s not the peaks I’m always after.
It’s the favorite spot. To trust that whomever leads you along will keep you safe, will thread you through a journey you can’t predict, teach you something new. To sweat because you’re working hard and not because it’s just hot. To lean into music that tells you how to move because you cannot not move in its wake.
I took that class today.
It wasn’t five dollars. It was free because now I also teach there. And the hot swell of emotion gave way to the deadest savasana when I realized how much color I have missed.