It’s been a busy summer bringing new things to light. I love creation and have been thinking a lot about how creativity is a really long process that gets most of the attention at the end. It’s so easy to honor and celebrate the finished products and hard to see the months and years of work that back those creations up. Not just the work itself but the time to gain whole skill sets to even do the work. I think of this often in social media where time lapse videography is used to keep the viewers interest and reduces the time it takes for something to come to life from the real hours, days, and months, into a gloriously perfect 30 second clip. There is no problem with showing it this way, as long as both viewer and creator we acknowledge that it isn’t reality to move so fast and it’s not real to have that easy looking perfection in any process.
If you happen to be a person (like me) who tends to be working on about 10 big projects at a time, the real, slow, and imperfect journey can create a lot of not so awesome feelings along the way. I tend to want everything done, now, or perhaps yesterday. Yoga helps me with this, and some times so does something else…
I had the good fortune of getting sick a few weeks ago. I say good fortune with no irony. I did at last get covid and it was mild in the general scheme of things. My symptoms were (on paper) classified as mild, yet my high energy self found this sapped ALL of my energy and 5 days laying in bed was a huge set of brakes on all the things. I honestly thought when I was in the beginning of it that I would catch up on all my reading, maybe watch some movies, and pound out some behind the scenes computer work. And my body was like “nah”. I’m conservative on this and took my isolation seriously – from my own family and everyone else. I didn’t leave my house until the 10 days I was probably contagious were up, not super fun. Even less fun was my inability to do ANYTHING of what I would call value for 7 days. I couldn’t even seem to follow TV that had a plot. I watched an absurd amount of bad reality dating shows and I may have tried every filter on Instagram. I’m not proud, but I do now know which “meme cat” I am, who my Disney parents are, and what I would look like as Captain Jack Sparrow.
Beyond all that not-so-deep knowledge I gained, the good fortune part was that I was supposed to be on vacation two days after I tested positive, and while a cancelled vacation isn’t by default “good”, the fact that I had all my classes already covered meant I didn’t have to stress. Although I was sad and frustrated (and definitely threw myself a pity party) it gave my mind a break from the squirrels that run through it seemingly without end. I was, in no small part due to years of yoga and preaching/practicing the resting side of it, able to accept it and settle into being still and letting myself rest.
The best part is now that the fog is lifting I feel like I’m on fire. I feel like the clarity I needed arrived while I was busy doing nothing. While my to-do list is legitimately taking up a large amount of space, I don’t feel overwhelmed. Instead I feel excited that I get to do so many things and to be of service in so many ways.
