The longer I sit to work on a laptop each day as I get older, the more my body packs it in. If I wasn’t practising yoga, I imagine it would be a lot worse. It seems strange that I feel the need to get stronger to be able to perform the not-apparently-arduous task of just sitting at a desk. At the same time, I also need to come up with a back-up plan to be able to teach more physical things so I don’t need to spend hours on a laptop.
Which is how I have found myself at two reformer Pilates classes the past two weeks. I thought I’d give it a try to see if it might be something else I want to pursue. Two classes isn’t enough to make a judgement, so I’ve signed up for ten and we’ll see. While it feels like muscles are being targeted more precisely than in yoga, I don’t break into a sweat so it doesn’t feel like I’ve given 100%. I’ve come away feeling a bit like, is that it? It’s no better or worse than, say, a HIIT class — more precise, less sweat. Both seem to be exactly what they say on the can, nothing more.
What yoga seems to offer, or has to me at least, is more complete. It offers, through a consistent physical practice, a connection to something greater than myself. While it takes a while for this to emerge fully (and it just does — the postures are that magical) for me I had a feeling right from the start that it was about more than just healing a sore back. It’s a complete package: physical, mental, spiritual, and can create a real sense of purpose.
Which ties in to developments this week in the US.
Like the followers of ISIS, one of the reasons the followers of QAnon can get swept up into (batshit crazy) radical thinking is because they are looking for purpose. Rebecca Solnit looks at the trail from Al Qaeda to QAnon in the wake of the Capitol attack here.
Purpose. We’re all looking for it.
This is not to say that everyone needs to find yoga to find purpose.
In a way, yoga in fact makes you okay with coming to terms with not actually having, nor there being, a purpose to anything at all. It just seems to make everything all right. It lets you detach, but still care.
In my notes this week I wrote: “The goal isn’t to get anywhere in particular. It’s to move along in a particular fashion.” I don’t know whether I stole this from someone or what inspired it now, but that’s it, in a nutshell.
I also jotted down this Nietzsche quote: “There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.”
Yoga helps me, at least, tap into that wisdom. Not, so far, reformer Pilates.
Reading
Lucy Trelour’s Wolfe Island and Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age.
This essay by Ann Patchett (Truth and Beauty, Bel Canto, State of Wonder, Parnassus bookstore owner) is the best magazine piece I’ve read in ages. It features Tom Hanks, psilocybin, private planes and a lot more. Make a cup of coffee, put your feet up and read it slowly.
I had set my intention to help my friend, to hold her hand and go with her while she went to peer over the cliff, the cliff that, coincidentally, I fell off.
When it was over, I managed to make my way into the shower, perhaps the biggest single accomplishment of my life.
In a compelling 30,000 words, “The Plague Year” dives deep into how the US has handled the pandemic.
Oliver Burkeman has a list of nine things to help you in 2021. I love this Joan Tollifson quote:
In Buddhism, they call it no-self, emptiness, non-clinging or groundlessness. This emptiness isn’t a bleak, nihilistic void; it is the red fire engine streaking past, the aroma of morning coffee, the exquisite song of the hermit thrush at dusk, the listening silence that remains when the sound is finished. And that silence, like the emptiness of deep sleep, is not a dead void but a vibrant aliveness.
How Instagram helps launder misinformation to women in particular:
Instagram is women’s work, as it demands skills they’ve historically been compelled to excel at: presenting as lovely, presenting as desirable, presenting as good, safe, nonthreatening. All of which, of course, are valuable appearances for a dangerous conspiracy theory to have. Ironically, following many of the QAnon hobbyists will lead to a suggestion from Instagram that you follow Chrissy Teigen, one of QAnon’s designated villains, who also happens to have created a brand based on a desirable domestic life. The platform itself is operating on its interpretation of beautiful surfaces, and far less so on what the people producing them are saying.
Pieces of a Woman is just out on Netflix. I don’t think I can watch a movie featuring a woman in labour for 30 minutes ending with the baby being still born, even if it’s Vanessa Kirby playing the role (she played Princess Margaret in The Crown). This profile of her is worth a read though.
Sadly no answers yet in my search for a doppelganger. Maybe you’ll find yours.