the Yoga Story
I've worked in restaurants for almost exactly 18 years now, mostly as a server, but I've done other, less instantly gratifying things like bus tables, seat guests, tend bar and manage staff; I've done administrative work for large corporate chain restaurants and I've bought emergency bulks of flatware from the Salvation Army when our tiny independent place was running dangerously low. I've done it by the book, I've winged it, I've worked it from every angle from which one can work it and I am at a crossroads, one where I know that this business will kill me. It will steel me and freeze me, it will give me lung cancer on 30 December 2007 and I will wind up in maximum security prison for killing a sexist/racist/good-for-little-more-than-warming-a-stool loudmouth that says the one thing that pushes me over my edge.
It was a fine occupation for someone of my caliber -- Read: Lost With Little Direction -- for a good many years but outside forces and inner voices were relentless in their encouragement to further myself, to pursue a career that was more financially stable, to take a position that showcased my true "worth," to go back to college (no one, not even my own inner voice, ever had a valid suggestion as to "what for") or to just plain take a more respectable job. This last suggestion instigated a good deal of hostile defense on my part: Whaddya mean, more respectable? Still laboring under that popular misconception that food service is for dummies? Still believe that labor, in and of itself, is for the undereducated, the sludge-witted, the pretty (or not) faces over empty shells? Or that waitressing, as I really like to call it, is only a stepping stone to greater things, a temporary job that pays one's way through a struggle to a bigger cause?
I'm going to leave out the part where I've argued, ad nausaeum, the social construct of "tipping" and will only say that if you are one of the gazillions of knuckleheads out there that don't tip because you have some kind of ill-informed notion that servers should take jobs that pay better or that you are not responsible for making up someone's salary on behalf of a greedy proprietor that refuses to pay his employees a living wage, I respectfully urge you to stuff a sock in it until you get to the reception area of your local congressional representative and lobby for change. Withholding a gratuity from a server based on your fucked-up notion of what is or isn't right won't change the social construct, won't wake anyone up to your point of view, won't make a lick of difference -- unless, of course, you consider me licking your fork before placing it on your table "making a difference."
Kidding. Sort of.
I'm getting older, quickly. My physical tolerance for 6-8 standing-and-running hours for four nights per week is dwindling; my spiritual and emotional tolerance for American society's sense of entitlement and instant gratification is even weaker. I actually love my current job, moreso than any restaurant job I've had in the past, but I find myself dreading the interaction with the customers more than I ever have these days, which makes getting myself from A to B (home to work) more challenging than I'm comfortable with and I can no longer leave B without consuming some alcohol -- albeit a small amount but every working shift is not right, for me, anyway -- to quell the accumulated nightly stress. Add to it that my son and husband are at home, eating frozen stromboli, watching samurai movies and living like the bachelors that they aren't for a good portion of the week and you've got an imbalance in the nature of the family and the spirit that's no good, no how. I've found myself in front of the lottery counter, wanting to buy a ticket (or 20) in hopes that I can put this life behind me, I feel empty headed and weak in the face of the concept of a career change: I haven't any idea of my purpose, I haven't a passion that seems tangible in this lifetime but I have to work. We are tenuously middle income and although we live with a very small footprint, we are still human and we still have needs and desires and small children grow and society requires that we clothe them outside the home.
In January of this year, I gave in to the mounting pressure (light pressure! light, light, no need for guilt, Hax) from acquaintances and aforementioned (hax) friends to give yoga a go; I had recently been diagnosed perimenopausal, I'd been suffering from horrific mood swings and rages and depressions and debilitating physical pain and although the injections to which I agreed have given me miraculous relief, I still knew that along with agreeing to such a medical commitment meant that I would need to commit to myself to live better, spiritually and physically, for the final 44-or-more years of my life. So with both feet and little ado, I jumped right in and went to my first yoga class, bright and early on a chilly Sunday morning. It is here that I will admit the truth about what I experienced and what mounts, what grows and flourishes in me every day when I wake up and face life in a way that I never even bothered to imagine.
With the exception of the birth of my son, I have never experienced something so profound and life-altering as the connection I feel with myself and the world when I am on the mat and I have never had an experience that stays with me, 24 hours a day. I live, eat and breathe this stuff, this yoga and these yamas, I am humbled entirely in my existence and my exhalations, I am ceaselessly awed by my body's ability at an age where I was convinced the downward was immediately pending.
It's always in the last place you look, said my father...seems his adage applies to more than a lost sock, set of keys or the remote control, but to life's purpose itself. To say that I knew, after my first class, that this is what I want to do with my life -- spread the yogic love, teach, give it back -- would be a lie: Truth told, I went home and passed out, I hadn't moved my body like that since gymnastics in the eighth grade, but within a few weeks I could see that the time it took me to really love my son was mirrored in the time it took me to really love yoga: Pensively, hestitantly, reflectively, reflexively: It was there, from the first chaturanga dandasana, but it waited a few weeks to call, like a good love should, it met me halfway, it wasn't pushy or overbearing or full of ego or self. It waited for me, and when I got there I saw a light that shone brighter than any love I'd seen since Fergus, one that isn't external or trying but that radiates from my center and drives my purpose of a better life. I love everything more now because of it, I love my husband more and my yard and my morning coffee and my scaly feet and music and my friends and my family; I even love my self-flagellation and my insecurity now because I accept that it is part of who I am, part of my struggle.
In the spirit of the Secret -- which I have not read and of which I am profoundly skeptical -- I will borrow this one thing: I will no longer try, I will do. I will also respect my physical and spiritual limitations and not push myself further than I am capable, I will respect aparagraha, or non-possessiveness, and not covet as fact my goal to teach -- it might not happen. But I really hope that it does.
Namaste.
