Stop, recalibrate, and listen
HALF WILD's back with a brand new edition. On stillness, inspiration, and soaking up the good stuff in savasana.
At the end of a yoga class, you lay on your back in a final savasana and this, they say, is where the real work gets done. The poses and pushing and pain were all in preparation for this moment of corpselike stillness, where the toil soaks into your bones. Prone, your body integrates the changes you’ve made and when you reemerge you are born again. The person you were when you entered your practice is gone, twisted and torqued and sweated out on the mat.
Today is Sunday and I am in my own kind of savasana.
For three years I avoided stagnation by piling on more chaos, traveling, burning through my savings, ending up back at my parents’ house to let my bank account refill. Yesterday, I sent 50,000 carefully culled and crafted words to an editor with the intention of turning them into a book. Those two things could not have coexisted, but the book never would have happened if not for the movement. Each story was about moving, moving on, and my long-held mantra that the scariest place to go is nowhere.
For months, those stories permeated my every thought. Now that they are out of my hands, I feel like I’m just laying here. I’m waiting, like I always have, for the next big thing to happen. I’m once again waiting for my life to start.
You should know that nothing scares me more than being stuck. I disguised that fear as adventurousness and used it to chase the dream of finding my most best place, my perfect neighborhood, my highest self. I thought I was looking for home, and as long as I didn’t find it, I would maintain my perpetual state of flux. I felt at home in the change, but I also felt disconnected and chaotic. In my wandering, I was a broken power line violently sparking after a storm. My energy had nowhere to go, so it went everywhere.
Secretly, I prayed for home.
Wise words
Home is where one starts from.
T.S. Eliot
ICYMI
Last time, I just ranted about my mostly unrequited love for shopping. This piece was all about how my delusions of being fabulously wealthy are just the outward manifestation of a desire for safety and comfort. In context of this week’s story, shopping is also a fabulous distraction from getting to know yourself. Check it!