Boy, I have been meaning to post
for a while. I have been interested
lately in a certain duality that seems to come up frequently for me. I noticed some weeks ago how funny my
obsession with getting the best parking spot by my office is. I get so happy when one of the very closest
non-time-limited spots is available and can be weirdly dejected when I have to
park a block away (oh, woe is me). When
I notice this, it seems silly, which flips me over to the other side of the
duality—it doesn’t matter and/or I don’t care.
Now, I’m seeing this process
everywhere. Like I usually eat a salad
for lunch that is a lot the same from day to day, but there are some
ingredients that are crucial while others are more variable. The other day, I left off the toasted
sunflower seeds (which fall into the crucial category) and I was very focused
on the lack until I switched to the it-doesn’t-really-matter line, trying to
convince myself that the salad was just fine.
Which, of course, it was AND it would have been better with the
sunflower seeds.
We ended up talking about this a
lot on the recent yoga teacher training—the idea that two seemingly opposing
ideas can both be true and also that there is a vast area between “everything
has to be exactly so” and “I don’t care” (it’s not either/or, it’s a spectrum
of gray). While parking places and
salads can feel important to me in a given moment, it’s not hard for me to
realize that they don’t have a very big impact really and also that it’s okay
for me to have preferences. There are
other things, big things, that really do seem important, like environmental
destruction or poverty, which make the duality more interesting. When I find myself in the “it doesn’t matter”
place with these, it becomes clear that this is a coping strategy—I feel so
helpless or overwhelmed, that I just want to give up or check out. The helplessness arises directly out of the
sense that this thing is so important that it has to change now and it’s up to
me. If I didn’t swing so far one way, I
wouldn’t swing so far the other.
There is a commonly quoted yoga
sutra, sthirasukhamasanam, which is usually translated as something like, “One’s
posture should be steady and comfortable.”
Donna Farhi has a translation I love: “Through steadfastly abiding in the part of
the self that is unchanging, one finds ease within the posture of the moment.” People talk less about one of the sutras that
follows (2.48) that describes the result—if you are able to be steady and
comfortable in your pose, you conquer dualities. It makes sense to me; if I am able to
transcend or integrate opposites in my posture, this will lead the way to doing
it in other parts of my life. This
middle way is not rejecting either side, but embracing them both. I feel like I’ve been sitting with this koan,
“How can something be important and not important at the same time?” I say it’s a koan because I feel like I’m
getting to understand it, but I can’t really explain it to you.
