Milestone moments passing us by

Do you ever reach a milestone moment in your life and walk past it like nothing’s happened? Or maybe you’re the type to celebrate. I’m the former with an intention to do more of the latter. That is to say, I’d like to imbue my life with a bit more celebration and significance. So much of it is so…mundane,  right?

Day in and day out, small pleasures and annoyances. When the big moments arrive, they aren’t always accompanied by fireworks. It’s easy to take the whole thing for granted, until we’re reminded memento mori. You know Latin, right? It means “remember you must die.” The way we do holidays these days suggests that Halloween’s getting close, so I’m taking the liberty to be macabre now. 😊 

This newsletter isn’t about death, although fear of it is a fundamental obstacle to yoga, in part because the fear of death causes a clinging or attachment to objects, ideas, and identities that cloud one’s true nature (so say the Sutras).  

This newsletter is more a reflection on milestones and recognizing the bullet points as they’re happening.  

Life bullet points

When I look back at my life so far, I remember it like bullet points. It begins mostly with the passage of school years. Each time I went into a new school there’s a new bullet point, a new set of memories. Once I graduated college I was cast into an abyss of forevermore. There wasn’t an off-the-shelf passage of two or four years to package into another bullet point. It was an overwhelming feeling, especially so because I hated my job.  

It’s been eleven years since then. Even without built-in bullet points, they’ve happened. It’s just been more difficult to recognize when I move from one to the other, except in hindsight. Like I said, I’d like get better at acknowledging the bullet points as they happen.  

My recent bullet point

So, last night was a bullet point for me. I taught my first two in-person public yoga classes since the beginning of the pandemic. It was SO DIFFERENT THAN BEFORE!! For a million reasons.

My teaching has evolved with you all over Zoom and through this newsletter. We were all wearing masks. I was teaching people in the room and streaming live on Zoom in a new-to-me studio. I had one headphone in my ear, which made me feel a bit like a news anchor. I met about twenty people all at once,  a totally novel experience after the novel coronavirus made its debut.  

Even with all that newness, it felt like any other night. Ha! I went to work, stopped by the grocery store on the way home, lounged on the couch with my husband and cat. The whole thing could have passed as any other day passes. And truly, it did. I’m making it significant by thinking about it that way and sharing it with you. Telling someone about it. Marking it.  

I grew up with an embroidery on the bathroom wall. It didn’t say memento mori (although I would absolutely put that up in my house). It said this: Today is the first day of the rest of your life.  

It’s totally true.  

Image by Alex Brites from Pexels