Monotony Awakens Us
The Pilates instructor, on all fours, extended her right leg back and her left arm forward. “And hold, and hold, and hold,” she commanded to a class of sweaty, wincing students. We tried our best to stay frozen for what must have been 8 second but what felt like an agonizing eternity. Time stopped and there was only the pain and my body’s struggle to keep it out.
“And release!” We collapsed onto our hands and feet. “Holding a position shakes things out of us,” she reminded us, “Are they good things or are they bad things?”
It’s true. When I’m holding a strenuous position, random feelings or images are layered into the waves of pain. During this hold, I spontaneously saw an old friend laughing hard, head tilted back. I didn’t know what it meant—maybe my brain’s attempt to comfort itself amidst my body’s screams.
If holding a challenging physical pose can jostle insight from our shoving muscles, holding a mental pose might produce similar effects. Right now, little changes in my day-to-day. I’m not learning much, I’m not exercising my cognitive capacity. I have a creeping suspicion this current version of myself has overstayed its welcome. I’m beginning to feel the crescendoing burn of holding a position.
I’m cramping from the stagnation, growing stiff and fragile. Beads of sweat have formed on my brow, the pads of my fingers sink into the mat to steady me. But the monotony is allowing me to hear a bass-y voice in the dungeons below my diaphragm. The stillness of holding this pose is allowing the dust to settle long enough to hear the voice’s words.
It’s been telling me who I am these past few weeks. It’s been reminding me what I’m capable of. It’s not been encouraging so much as cautionary. There’s a probable life path ahead of me full of miserable yearning and nostalgia. There, I am a forlorn form, a ghostly simulacrum that walks through my future home, laughs with my wife, plays with my children. That version of me may still be respected, the rumbles say, but I won’t respect myself.
Major transitions in our lives roil our waters, the plumes of sediment obfuscating our ability to navigate our lives with clear direction and intention. There’s no prefrontal capacity left to plan or optimize. Standing back up is the only goal.
Once we achieve a level of automation, our minds our freed to wander, create, dream. We can introspect and notice patterns about ourselves. We can ask luxurious questions about what makes us happy and what we want our life mission to be. With no immediate threat, we naturally graduate from our primitive self-preservation instincts and settle into our humanity, with all its lofty multi-dimensionality.
The other life path ahead of me is much more treacherous and unwelcoming. It’s full of doubt and uncertainty and failure. There is deep joy and fulfillment there too though, however improbable. The intensity of that fulfillment doesn’t exist on that first path. But is it worth plunging myself into chaos for? I’m still deciding.
Holding,
Vandan