A Retrospective
With a blend of traditions and science
Tomorrow I turn 50, which has led me to some reflection as turning the clock on a full decade is apt to do.
Ten years ago, just before the weekend I turned 40, I opened my third yoga studio. I don’t know if anyone who came to teach in this location could imagine how much I was teetering between excitement and knowing I was completely over my head. And, yet, so many beautiful and unexpected relationships and connections came into and out of that space.
What became of that space and the two others? What has become of those 10 years since? Meditation teacher Jack Kornfield likes to say that all of time becomes like that of the dinosaurs, gone and not gone, no matter how long it’s been.
Over these ten years I’ve lost big. In that time, two of my best friends have died, several family members, too. The business that was growing 10 years ago has closed. I look at pictures of myself in yoga poses from then and I see how much physical strength and flexibility I once embodied. Yet, I’d say I’ve gained far more than I’ve lost.
What goes on still? What has rooted itself into new life?
As I say goodbye to my 40’s, enter into this new decade, I am thinking of the law of conservation of matter telling me that matter is not created or destroyed; it is only rearranged in space.
I am thinking, too, of the ancient Greek words for life, the two different meanings that my pastor taught. The word “life,” she said, speaks of both the bios, which is the individual life, unique and fleeting. And the zoe, which as she explains it, is “Life with a capital L - the powerful play that goes on and on, and we each in our bios may contribute a verse.”
This past week, as a gift to myself and to the butterflies and hummingbirds around my home, I bought 6 dahlia plants. Just before I made the purchase, I paused. They’re annuals and with cold weather on the near horizon, what is the point really? They’re life expectancy isn’t long.
Then I drank in their bright and insistent color and nearly scooped up even more to buy. What is the point of creating, of living at all, if not for this reminder that life is both fleeting and goes on and on somehow? There is a rooting that changes and recreates the whole of life itself with any one individual life.
I feel these last ten years in my body, old strength assimilated into something different and new, I’d even say deeper. I feel the businesses I built in the work I do now, the connections from then having grown into friendships and work that remain. I feel my friends and family who’ve died in the heartbeat of the relationships that encircle me now. There’s a rhythm to this that is from past and present, both eternal and regenerative.
Yoga philosophy reminds me in Sutra 1.4 that by not attaching to the chatter in my mind, I can see the whole of life’s fluctuations for what they are and not attach myself to the fluctuations as if they are the most real thing. They are only real for a moment, and yet there is something more real that never fluctuates at all. Resting in this wider perspective is, I think, the understanding of bios and zoe.
An individual life goes. The eternal life encircles and flows onward.
Nothing destroyed or created, only waves of fluctuations that are held in a wide and vast ocean. Both small l life and big L life held together.
And so, Christa who was turning 40 is somehow still and ever here in Christa who is turning 50. Yet that other me is also gone. With the dinosaurs as Jack would say. I am equally perplexed and grateful by these turnings and for this new age. There is so much more to gain since nothing is ever really lost.
I’ll end with this blessing I heard Francis Collins offer on Kate Bowler’s Everything Happens podcast. He attributes this to Benedictine sister Ruth Fox and adds his own nudge at the end. I think this is a fine way for me to start a new decade, and perhaps a fine way for you as well:
Four parts. May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half-truths and superficial relationships so that you may live deep within your heart. May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression and exploitation of people so that you may work for justice, freedom and peace. May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation and war so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and to turn their pain into joy. And then, may God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in this world so that you can do what others claim cannot be done. I love that. Thank you, God, for the foolishness that we are occasionally given to try to take on something that everybody else says, no, that’s hopeless. It’s only hopeless if we let it be.
