Interlude

The past three days, I’ve been in a cabin in the northwoods of Wisconsin. Outside the windows the snow shrouds the earth, the lakes, the trees with their boughs reaching to the heavens in mostly gray sky. There is a peace and stillness to the surroundings, if you can hear it. If your mind will let you hear it.

Although it’s only been three days, it takes conscious effort for me to know that. Time moves differently, feels differently, moves on a frozen winter plane. The day to day of regular life feels like a memory. 

I am struck by how each time I remove myself from the day to day, with its emphasis on chasing down dishes and laundry, on adapting to hierarchical office culture, overdeveloped processes and minutiae over meaning, with its days that run past too quickly to get to all the things as darkness comes and suffocates the dreams of more – more what, I’m not sure – more life? – I dread the return to it. It’s not a mortal dread, just a poke and a tickle in the back of the heart. 

It’s the same sensation I get after a weekend of yoga teacher training. At first I thought that perhaps this was about spending time in YTT immersed in not just the nuance of movement but the nuance of thought and emotion as well which made the contrast of return hard to swallow. But I feel it here too, and despite the silence, the majesty of the forest, I am surrounded by noise, by chaos, by the sounds and colors of people mashed together.

We are here spread across two cabins, my partner and I with 8 others – a total of 10. 10 people who don’t know each other all that well really, there is a chain of connection among us, each couple invited by another couple. It’s an interesting social experiment. I sprained my ankle just before the trip. This has certainly complicated standing balancing poses, for one thing, but also has proven to be a slight blessing. It gives me a reason to stay home this morning for example while the others go off to ski, for me to observe the stillness and to hear myself on this day before the new year. 

People are hard for me. Still, at the same time that I require space, a buffer in which to soften my edges, I also require connection. I have a few friends in life that I feel connected to when I see them, but I feel that I am always working so hard for those relationships. In fact, I think if I didn’t do the work, the relationships might crumble. A risk. A hard one to take. And I know that that work is motivated out of love but also out of a fear of being alone. It’s hard to let love be what it is in the moment and to let it go when it’s natural to in order to leave space for that which is available in the next moment.     

The tension between connection and attachment is a difficult one. Relationships are, indeed, attachments. Can one love without attachment? My partner used to say so, back when we met. He would tell you that this is simply his life philosophy, nothing to do with all that yoga he was exposed to growing up in India and going to a school where yoga was part of the curriculum. He would have argued at the time I met him – maybe less so now – that love and attachment were incompatible.  That attachment came from need and something like ownership or possession.  

It made me crazy at the time. I never felt safe with him. He could leave at any time. But he could leave at any time anyhow, couldn’t he. We all can.  

As the years have passed and as the pandemic put us together in a collaborative relationship, his actions and attitudes have evolved in a way that makes it clear that his love is strong. We will never be traditional and we will often go our own ways and do our own things. But we come together to care for each other. And I love him. I no longer demand that he tell me the things that would make me feel safe or be the kind of partner my twenty-year old self imagined I would need.  

But love is hard. I worry about him, too. Love makes me worry. And I worry about our future. He would also say that worrying about the future is not useful to the present. He’s right of course. And he seems to live that. Which makes me worry about the future more, sometimes. The cycle of things. 

And we are about to enter another cycle. I remember once as a child thinking about the 2020s. It seemed so far off. I would be old then, I thought. But here I am, still trying new things, starting over, finding my way. I don’t have the house, the kids, the marriage, or even a stable career. Of course as a kid I imagined those things, but I also imagined other things. These things get lost sometimes. Perhaps in 2023 they can be found. In childhood, I think, authenticity is closer to the surface, easier to access.

I imagined a life in a cabin not so different from this one, in woods not so different from these, except located in mountains, with a dog, and books and a fireplace. There were no other people in that fantasy, funny enough. I also imagined traveling the world as a writer, planting myself in foreign places, meeting new people, having deep thoughts about who knew what and writing profound things. A citizen of the world, not of a single place. 

As I look to the year to come, I reflect on last year. I removed myself from people last year. I rewatched seasons of Ted Lasso after having spent the last month in Colorado, and I was sure that somehow in 2022, I’d see myself moving back there. I didn’t. 

Looking ahead to 2023, I’m unsure what I see. I will not be alone this year watching Ted LAsso. I will be with nine other people in a game room in northern WI, eating tacos while voices rise and fall with the rhythm of the night.  I didn’t really hear myself alone last year any more than I might hear myself among others this year.

Each year, I make a promise to myself that I will live my life authentically. It is my resolution of choice. In the past, I’ve made many changes in the name of doing that. A consistent theme of this blog, as well. I still believe YTT will bring me closer to me than other changes I have made.

But I still don’t really know what that authenticity really means or how it feels. And without a road map, authenticity seems like a lot of pressure. Perhaps, the first step is simply some grace, a recognition that with each sprained ankle comes a moment of rest and an opportunity to go within. Perhaps the place to start this year is with my fear of being alone, my fear of the future. And as I work through those internal fears, maybe I can hear myself in the din, see the divine on the horizon and move through the next cycle with greater grace.