My counselor says, “no….this is not fortune…it’s you finding your path.”  Normally I’d agree.  I love looking for my path and then talking about it in that very Tao-informed way.  But I’m not sure I can take any credit in looking or finding anything.  My life has changed because, and I completely mean this, the universe asserted itself and demanded that I respond.  And I responded…yes in a thoughtful way.  Yes in a responsible way.  But not because I wanted to…because I had to.  And lo and behold…I don’t know if the choice was “right”…but almost literally everything has changed.

Maybe this is a perspective thing: everything changed because some fundamentals shifted in this choice.  I now feel as though I can support myself and my near future is more stable.  Helpful, definitely helpful.  I now feel I have more power to govern some of the more toxic relationships in my life…I have new found weight to shift that I didn’t have before.  Also, very helpful.  I don’t hate what I’m doing…this is very good.  Never good to use “hate” as a regular descriptor in your day. But the effects of all of this seem exponential…If I’m a tree, even the tiniest little twigs are gathering in a new-found sense of life. It’s like I’m breathing again…after six years of not.

And here’s the crux, I suppose…I didn’t really have to do anything but make a choice…a choice which confronted me and not the other way around.  I just had to respond.  It is fortune, I think.  That mysterious hand that reaches in and intervenes when you, yourself, are unable.  It’s the answer to a prayer or the acknowledgement of a desperate cry for help.

Whatever it is…whew…it’s a life saver.

I’ve known a lot of interesting people over the years–for some reason, maybe random, I was vaulted back to thinking about a particularly exceptional guy I knew back in the early days of the journey.  His name is Steve…I assume he’s still doing his thing.  There’s a lot of good reasons to remember him; he was full of resonance.  He radiated: wisdom, love, grace.  I’ve never really met anyone else that can do that.  And still be a normal kinda “guy” too.  He was (and I’m guessing still is) a phenomenon. And this morning I woke up with his resonant baritone in my head–it’s literally the first time I’ve thought about him in probably five years–but there his voice was giving me the first thought of the day…and it’s a good one.

Usually I wake up with some trace of pop culture looping through my conscious.  It’s not rare for Lady Gaga to be all up in there; yesterday I woke up to the Black Eyed Peas suggesting, “I have a feeling (ooh-ooh), that tonight’s gonna be a good night, that tonight’s gonna be a good, good ni-igh-ight.”  Even if I tried I couldn’t tell you how the dial in that random jukebox up there works.  But last night I went to bed upset–always a major no-no.  I can’t even say that I was upset “at” something or that the feeling was even clear.  I wasn’t anxious, I wasn’t nervous or sad…I was just…”not feeling great” about things.  Lot’s of things.  I’ve taken to being bolder about taking risks lately and hanging myself out there to be critiqued or called on the carpet.  I, like many, want to take the least riskiest risks; I do things that might be out of my comfort zone but that seem to have the probability for a predictable outcome.  Go ahead judge me…I like to plan my risks.  Anyway, of course nothing has turned out the way I thought it would.  I expected people to respond in certain ways and when they didn’t it threw me off.  And it kinda stung.  It’s still stinging, actually, and last night as I was drifting off to sleep I was feeling particularly lost as to what I should do. How could I fix all of these things so I could feel better about them?

“Always do what love requires,” Steve whispered in my ear this morning as I woke up feeling guilty about choosing sleep over yoga.  And his voice intoning that refrain over and over played like a loop in my head for the first hour I was awake.  And it was (and is) the answer to all of the questions I had last night as I was drifting off.  It explains how to deal with the ways people have disappointed me over the past couple days, it prescribes for me how to graciously handle all of the good wishes yesterday when that is really hard for me and makes me incredibly uncomfortable.  It gives me a guide to consider in how I talk to myself in those moments when relentless critique seems the only correct action.  In so many ways it just is the answer.

Structurally, it’s about as close to a perfect answer we could ever hope for.  When? Always. What? Do. Do what? Whatever love requires…requires. It’s 100% responsive in nature; it acknowledges my love for different people and things is 100% unique in each case…and therefore, what that means depends on each case, each circumstance, each interaction.  And it roots my intention; not in selfishness, not in an agenda…but in love.  It is the prescription for compassion.  It asks me, out of love, to respond to what someone else needs (or what I need).  That is the challenge of love, I think.  It requires we know we’ll do something we would not choose otherwise for the sake of the person(s) we love.

Obviously, I think I need not dwell on how hard this is in reality.  It implies accepting others as they come to us, with their own needs and constraints.  It means consistently standing on that line, knowing you may not get this in return.  It means challenging your own fears for the sake of someone else.  It could mean having to let someone go.  Ugh.  Just thinking about the challenge of this makes me nauseous; this is a lesson in advanced compassion.  Even now, and every minute, I wonder if I’m up for it.

And then I think…I just have to be.  It’s such a good answer, the answer I was asking for that I cannot ignore it.  I guess it just means I’ll try.  That’s all I can promise.  Because I just cannot receive a gift like that, in such a timely manner and in response to such a direct request for help, and disregard it.

“Always do what love requires,” he said to me as though he was just standing there right next to me, waiting for me to wake up to share the notion.  Thanks Steve.  It’s good to hear your voice.

I’ve always played that little game with myself.  It’s a more abstract way of throwing down breadcrumbs–purposely–to remember and reflect on the differences between the way I think things will happen and the way they actually unfold.  Whenever I hit a “that moment,” I’m consistently amazed (and sometimes awed) by the incredible ways things work out.  It didn’t used to be my mantra but one of my new favorite phrases to insert anywhere doubt lives is “It’ll all work out.”  It’s my game that allows me to know that’s the case.  And even more incredibly, I’m never dissatisfied with the ways in which things work out.  It turns out life is a much better storyteller than I…it always throws in a plot twist I never could have dreamed up in a million years.

What’s interesting about the way the game has changed for me over the years is “that moment” used to be determined at the start of something big: when I started grad school, I wondered what it would feel like the first time I said, “This is the start of my 6th year” (sadly, I never imagined saying things like “this is the start of my 8th year” or “I’ve been doing this almost a decade” but I’d better start getting prepared).  In my first year in Chicago, I wondered where I’d be living 5 years down the road.  (The answer turns out to be “here.”)  And when it comes to people…well, those are stories I never could have even dreamed.  It seems, almost, that Chicago has upended almost everything I expected when I first got here.  My best friends are people that, upon meeting them I thought, “I want to be their friend but I don’t know how.”  Somehow, I figured it out–we figured it out.  Others I thought I’d know forever have fallen into the “friend ‘everything’ drawer.”  You know that one, completely jam-packed drawer of not even organized chaos that you just shove random things in and think, “I’ll definitely have to organize this drawer one of these days.”  That “friend drawer” is full of partial acquaintances or those “lost” forever in that morass of “I knew you really well once.”  I wonder what that moment will be like…the one immediately after I realize I’ve mostly cleaned out that drawer?  Aw, let’s face it: that drawer and my living room will never be really free of clutter…there will always be fragments of friends hanging out in there.

And here’s the most curious part of the “that moment” game: there are whole categories of things I’ve dared myself not to even imagine.  Things I want so desperately, so completely, that the thought of not having them actually gives me pain. The thought of missing them makes me irretrievably sad.  I specifically remember a series of moments like this when it comes to singing.  I remember walking out of contemporary choir and thinking, “It’s never going to be more than this and that’s okay,” but secretly wishing in my heart it would be, but I didn’t know how.  And “that moment” is here now…and some days I wonder where that path will continue to lead…and I can’t know; I just have to not ask questions.  When I use perfect, gut-wrenching honesty, my game has proven to me that a majority of things I’ve asked for, wished for, hoped for…I’ve gotten.  And when I examine the means, I know it’s a story I never could have created myself.  Had I undertaken it my way, I never would have reached the end I wanted.

Basically, my dining room reflection allowed me to conclude that I’m a crappy writer of fiction.  But I always knew that.  More importantly, though, if I allow the better writer of fiction to work…the ends…well, they’re always a story worth waiting for.

It’s the same conundrum I find in yoga literally every day.  It’s so much easier to jam yourself into a complicated pose, hold your breath, and wait out the pain for a minute than to find ease in whatever it is you’re doing.  I’m fascinated by the fact that the simplest poses–mountain pose (standing with your feet together, hands at your heart), seated cross-legged pose, forward fold–are really very hard to master.  Because they are “easy” poses–ones that require ease…one’s we often don’t have enough time–or courage–to really do correctly.  And I think it’s because they require introspection, they require quiet and a commitment to looking for what’s really in there when all the flashiness of complicated, complex, and achievement-driven falls away.  These poses are who you are when you’re standing, sitting, and folding.  Seems like they would be the resting poses; I am wasted by them repeatedly.

This is what makes me wonder what other people think as they walk down the street.  They look so self-assured so many of them.  And they’re going so fast and with so much stuff. The clacking cadence of heels, the amble of a dog walker, the unsteady gait of the grocery-laden–they’re going somewhere, they’re doing something–what are they thinking? Because as I’m flip-flopping toward home at what, for some, seems an uncomfortably slow pace…I’m thinking about what it means to be me today.  Maybe my pace reveals my lack of answers or the burden of the question…but that’s okay.  Because I don’t trust the quick clackers or the scurrying laden ones.  Industriousness, to me, says distraction. I’ve known a lot of fast walkers in my life; to this day I’m not convinced that any of them really knew where they were going. I think I’m judging them; wait, yep, I am.  That’s okay, too. It’s not like I haven’t been judged for my snail’s pace…I’ve actually been yelled at.  Water under the bridge, I suppose.

But I always feel solidarity with slow walkers.  I believe in my soul that the weight of the thought determines the ease of the walk…and I’m working hard to walk with as much ease as I can muster. Wherever I’m going will just have to wait.

I attribute the change to a couple things but most centrally…yoga.  It wasn’t so long ago (2 months, actually) that I regularly started taking yoga classes (not half-heartedly doing DVDs in my dining room…which I refer to as my ‘yoga studio’).  Somehow, the interaction with a teacher and other students began to work away at some of the anxieties that had built to the point of all of my ‘lesses.’  And in a way that doing yoga “at the gym” as a “workout” could never touch.  A return to the breath–the present moment–was and is the most holistically therapeutic thing I’ve ever done.  So much so, that I feel it has spurred “returns” in other places that, frankly, I thought were long gone.

“What the hell are you talking about Katie?” you must be thinking.  I understand that…the notion that enduring the burning, searing pain in my hamstrings created by a forward bend or working through the panic that arises right in my throat when I maneuver my way into a handstand or headstand could actually manifest itself in very real ways outside of the yoga studio (in this case, not my dining room) seems bizarre and crunchy-granola new agey (this is my own system of classification, just for the record).  But here’s how I’m seeing this work out:  old friends I haven’t spoken to in years have popped back up in moments that I really needed them.  (What freaks me out is that if I think real hard about it, it almost seems like I’ve “summoned” them to me…I know, I know…I’m in a panic about it myself.)  School which was an absolute albatross in February has returned as a true interest.  My financial situation–always tenuous at best–that was positively dire three months ago has positively worked itself out…and not just as a “hey I got a job at Best Buy” type of scenario but as a “hey I’m a fucking sociologist…now pay me to teach it” kind of way.  (Again, if I look hard, the Universe has clearly…CLEARLY…steered me back into the classroom in a very definitive way…and has arrange a payment system that is better than I’ve ever encountered before.)  I’ve been granted closure in the situations that were tearing me apart emotionally.  I’ve been granted insight into the most difficult challenges.  I’ve actually found in a new way what compassion means…especially in approaching myself and others with compassion.  And it’s because of those fiery forward bends and the heinous twists that make me feel like a real failure on the yoga mat.

It so interesting to really begin to understand what yoga teaches.  Everyone thinks about the “flexy-bendies”–you know, those people (usually women) who can lick their shins and turn themselves practically inside out and afterwards talk about how being a human pretzel gets them to a new level of enlightenment.  I have a new respect for them…yoga’s made them that.  But focusing on the physical stretching is just too one-dimensional; yoga has to also stretch your mind and your heart too.  Otherwise, we should call it calisthenics and be done with it.  No, yoga builds spiritual muscle-memory; it teaches you to endure, to dare, and to deal with emotions as they come and in a way that allows you to learn control and mastery of them.  Yogis talk about it in terms of detachment.  I just call it sanity.

But I’m glad I’m plugged into it.  It seems whenever I really focus on it, the Universe responds to me and returns me to exactly where I need to be.  And gives me things like this as a sign that I’m doing okay.

And as much as I don’t like this particular kind of simplicity, I can’t help but embrace a much more holistic idea of balance and complementarity.  I think the principles could be the same: I think there are opposing forces at work very often in my life but they don’t work to rend me apart as much as the work to balance the social order of things.  When I’m having a particularly horrendous day, very often my close friends are experiencing the opposite.  When I’m frustrated, if I’m open to it, I notice people stepping in, usually subconsciously, to alleviate that.   A day after I seem to make amazing progress on whatever challenge I’ve been laboring, there always seems to be an inevitable fall from grace (usually and ungraceful one).  I’ve never considered these opposing forces pulling me outward, farther and farther apart.  I’ve only come to understand them more definitely as a process of falling in and out of balance.  There’s always a yin to a yang.  There’s always a sweet to a savory.  There’s always compassion to follow judgement.  There’s always light after darkness.

One of my more recent insights of which I’m particularly proud (but really not attached) is to realize that these rhythms, this balance, is not linear.  These balancing forces appear to us as a cycle; ultimately, I think we can trust in the rhythm.  When we approach it as linear, everything appears out of place and is scary and creates anxiety.  If we’re always moving forward without paying attention to the backward, then we’re certainly going to be lost.  While the present always brings us something new, it also always (ALWAYS) reminds us of something old, something familiar, comfortable, to be honored.  But how much is that balance.  We have to want the balance…otherwise, the rhythm disappears.

This is a really abstract reflection on really concrete events I’m watching happen today.  From one source I see hurt–disappointment, discouragement, and wounding.  In the meantime, another source experiences great joy, abundance, and love.  I’m sitting in between contemplating watching “Glee” again and finding some contentment for both right where I’m standing right now.

It’s a weird day.  In that rhythmic, balanced sort of way.

“It’s been a rough couple months.” I realized I’ve been saying that, now, for years.  ”I just gotta get through this next interminably long period of waiting and things will be okay.” Then, like clockwork, another interminably long period of waiting starts on another new worry.  It’s seemed neverending…and is when approached in that fashion.

What I realized the other day, though, as I was sitting and lamenting to myself is that I’ve been coming at all of this from only one direction.  If I run around the other side of my worry, what appears is a huge opportunity: I have the time everyone wants to figure my shit out.  Yes, I have work to do.  Everyone has work to do.  But I do have the chance to really reach in and find myself in there– a lot of people don’t.  And I should really stop waiting and start reaching.

I think everybody has one major personal mountain to climb in their lives.  This isn’t hardships–I think we all have a lot of those.  But hardships are circumstantial; we struggle, usually, because we have to meet reality everyday and sometimes, when our expectations and our world doesn’t match up evenly, we run into trouble.  The personal mountain, though, is that one foundational “issue” that sets the tenor for all struggles.  It’s those little dark parts of ourselves we don’t want to think about that drive the way we respond to tough circumstances.  Mine personal mountain is definitely born directly from fear of reaching.  I’m growing convinced that this is why I’m so worried about getting swallowed up, lonely and alone, by the sands of time.  I’m not a reacher.  I’m a nester.

So, in all of my “time” that I have to think about things, I’ve realized that I’m not going to un-stick myself from this place unless I actually start reaching…somewhere.  Instead of being solely reactionary, I’ve got to reach beyond that and be a little proactive.  Instead of clinging to the idea of routine, I have to reach beyond that.  Being the Disney princess that I am, I think I’ve grown accustomed to the idea of fate–things happening.  And I’m actually coming around to see that fate is what happens when you realize that just letting things happen will lead you in random directions.

Life is reaching.  I’m not sure I’ve really found that yet but I’m willing to give it a try.

No, instead, I’m going to build on the somewhat popular, new-to-this-blog topic of friends being asses.  It seems fruitful territory to mine these days; at least, I learn an awful lot about myself.

I think it’s no secret (unless you read this blog and literally absorb nothing I write about) that I’m in a period of reflection, transition, self-discovery…all brought on my these crazy circumstances of change everywhere I turn.  Like “epic dreams” that allow your subconscious to speak “truth” to you in dreams, my life right now is at “epic transition.”  I’m totally day to day.  And I’ve already discussed how important my friends are in keeping me afloat in what can be tumultuous seas.

But this tumult also breeds a really bad habit on my part and what can be really bad behavior on the part of some of my friends: they can be mean to me and I’m likely not able to call them on it.

I know…it’s funny even to think about that weird contradiction–if people are mean to us, how can they be friends?  But no, there is a fine line I think lying in between people being comfortable enough to “be who they are” in their darkest of forms and people just being…well, asses.  And this is a line we (meaning the “me”s in this situation) regulate…it’s up to us to defend who we are and what people are allowed to do to us.  Although, arguably, when it comes to friends, we should never have to. (What can I say…I’m still an idealist at heart…and head…okay, I’m an idealist at the most molecular level.)

I realized today that this has been happening to me for awhile…with someone(s) I do consider my ports in this daily storm.  And it makes me sad in several dimensions.  I’m sad I let it happen.  I’m sad they’ve taken advantage (although I’m sure they’re not even aware…which, incidentally, is why we can still be friends).  I’m sad I have to confront my “ports,” a situation that could render me…wait for it…portless.  And portlessness is a scary place to be.  But it’s not scarier, necessarily, than have ports whose waters aren’t shelters but are actually barnacle-pummeling storms (okay, I’m done with the boat metaphor now.)

I guess the realization is this…I’ve assumed the storm was outside of this group of folks I’ve surrounded myself with…only to discover that they’re part of the storm.  I do have faith that I’ll be heard in whatever way I choose to address it; these conversations won’t be easy, but I think they’ll be fruitful.  But I keep moving along as though I’m protecting something I have.  What I’m really protecting is just a mirage…once again, the choice to face what is real rears its ugly head.  At least there isn’t a decision to be made; this simply cannot go on.  But things will change…another transition.

What’s hard to remember is that there are transitions that will bring about more difficulty and there are transitions that will actually get us to a better place.  This specific case is definitely the latter; my life will be qualitatively better not swallowing the bad behavior (no matter the intention) or justifying it…or contextualizing it…or rationalizing it.  I’m going to get away with much less work on a daily basis.

But I’m not fully prepared to accept that some of these “friends” might not be “friends who are asses sometimes.”  They might, in fact, just be “asses.”  And maybe it’s time for them to find another lost little rowboat to pummel (sorry…I needed just one more go…)

I’m hoping…really hoping…for option A.

This life is a challenge.

I remember when I was teaching at Walsh and worried that if I stayed there the next 25 years would look exactly the same and I wasn’t happy with that. So instead I chose a life that requires every February – May to be a scramble to figure out how I’m going to support myself, keep inspired, stay healthy, not go totally nuts with worry. And now I find myself looking back at the Walsh days with a fond nostalgia toward its consistency.  Everything there is pretty much the same.

So, this, maybe is the lesson I’m supposed to learn in graduate school, the one I didn’t know I was paying for: that life goes on, opportunities come and go, people come and go, and my life and that which ultimately stays important is where I am.

These last months have been hard, presenting me with challenges I’ve never even thought about facing…mostly involving taking action on plans of which I cannot envision an exact, finite end point.  It’s truly been about making moves with the resources I have now and hoping that it works out in the end and at the same time learning how to adjust expectations and re-frame the way things work out when they’re beyond my control.  I’m learning one step at a time to “go with the flow.” It’s been backbreaking some days.

But I should learn to be careful what to wish for.  For the last several years I’ve bemoaned a lack of constancy in my life.  I’ve hoped for some kind of foundation to ground me.  I think I’ve found my constant and it’s name is change.

It’s not the constant I expected.  But it sure is always there.

Anyway, I’ll kill myself to remember the Budakon guy’s name but he is amazing…he’s like some kinda black belt in Tae Kwon Do (I’m sure that’s spelled wrong) but super stretchy so he does yoga too.  This is not the point, however.  My point is he said something in one of the videos (that I basically did for 2 years straight) that has stayed with me.  He used to say, “When you concentrate on something, it expands.” What?

I had images in my head of swirling power energies and chakras and auras and things.  I felt I was out of my element.  It was new agey and weird.  But this little thought has followed me around like a nagging 2-year-old for years.  So finally, I stopped to give it its due and…I think he’s right.

If you concentrate on it, it expands.

Of course.  I’ve been doing this for years but I didn’t know it and actually I think it’s been killing me.  Allow me to demonstrate with…a cheeseburger.  Sorry all one of you vegetarians who may or may not be reading this…but one of the few things I crave hard in this world is cheeseburgers…like the, “I need it now” craving.  Once I’ve established that I need that cheeseburger…it’s all I can think about.  It consumes every other thought.  It’s always poking around from the dark corners of my brain, asserting itself mercilessly on my poor frazzled psyche…until I get it…and then happiness.  The same goes for misery and discontentment and loneliness…all that seem to be conditions brought on by reality but all that are actually my own mantras, allowed to form through the circumstances I’m in.

All of this is a long way to say, I’ve decided to choose happy.  It’s a very conscious decision right now because choosing unhappy is a well-formulated awful habit I’ve picked up.  But I ran a little test experiment not too long ago and, I’ll tell ya what, choosing happy works. I think the key for me was realizing that in my life, the opposite of happy is not unhappy, but worried.  I somehow roll around gloriously in my worry…if I’m not worried, I start to worry that I should be. Frankly, it’s ridiculous.  So, I’ve chosen strategically what and how much I’m allowed to worry about things…and I’ve actually started breathing again and everything.

Choosing happy is not easy.  I’ve been trained in worry.  And I’m good at worry…but it’s only taken about 17 years (alright, alright, 28 years) to realize that it’s not worth it.  There is a time and place for everything.

It’s time to give happy its due.  Thanks Budakon guy…whatever your name is.