The Weird Stuff

New Year's Day, 2021

New Year’s Day and I go running through the empty, rainy streets. This is the kind of weather that keeps people indoors. Not me. When others go in, I go out! I long ago stopped worrying about what people thought of me—by thirty, I’d chastised and judged myself enough for any lifetime. At 55, a rather beautiful number (two friends kneeling in prayer?), I am healthier, calmer, more balanced than ever. After practicing a good deal of yoga, I can run now without pain or cramping in my calf muscles. I know how to breathe a full lungful and feel that breath’s bright power. How to enjoy the run!

Not long ago, I’d have been scared to share my age, ashamed, as I’ve been taught. Who’d publish my work now or get excited by my appearance on the world’s stage? Now I am happy, arrived merely halfway, perhaps, through this gift of a life. Well, five or six ninths, but who’s counting? I have walked (run, ridden, driven, flown) a long way to get here and, if I’m lucky, there’s a long, beautiful road ahead. I know now to stop often and look around. It’s not about the run, the distance covered or the speed, the pounds lost, but about what I notice on the way, what I let myself pause long enough to feel.

Near the end of my run, I stop to do yoga in the park. Twisting and stretching in all the directions, hanging upside down, bending backward, or sitting in a squat at the base of a patient oak, I see things I’d have missed before. The shape of a particular tree, the way the ground looks to a bird. How the air feels in between rain and no rain. In truth, I’ve always been curious, distracted by beauty, but it’s only recently I’ve come to allow this curiosity full reign––allowed myself to fully inhabit this world, my life without wobbling on some raw edge of self-consciousness.

My 13-year-old cringes when I tell her I’ve been doing yoga poses in the park, in public as she imagines, though I take care to merge in with the trees. Her most mortifying experience to date was when I stepped out of the car in traffic on the way to the Charleston coast to stretch into Warrior One as the river bridge lifted to let through the big boats. Someone took my picture, she said, and laughed at me.

It pains me that my children must go through this long adolescent terror we suffer of being judged: that I cannot teach them in spite of all I’ve learned to move on through it more quickly than I did. What feels like those wasted decades of castigation and self-denial, but was of course necessary to my growth. We plant the tulip bulb, after all, before a hard frost.

The practice of yoga is full of weirdness: tongues extended, eyes rolled back, legs contorted, colors forming and dancing in the brain––a third eye! Lying absolutely still without giving in to thought, that thing we find so hard. What it teaches us better than anything, perhaps, is how to embrace that weirdness: things much less strange, if you think about it, than a planet full of people rushing around missing their very lives. Forgetting to stop and feel the wonder.