Life Goes On

Last week, I wrote about my yoga student whose uncle was summarily executed in Bangladesh after a sham political trial.  She was understandably distraught and weepy during class.  This week, she came back.  I saw her as I was setting up the room and immediately went over to check in.

She was glowing.  I've actually never seen her this happy or peaceful.  It was like someone threw a switch and turned her emotional state around 180 degrees.

She told me it had been a difficult week for her, with a lot of ups and downs.  But her life had settled around her.  School had started, and instead of complaining about her students, as she has done in the past, she is enjoying teaching them and that they were (so far) nice and eager to learn.  Her pregnancy is well into the wonderful second semester, when the exhaustion and nausea of the first trimester are gone but you're not peeing all the time and feeling huge like you do in the last trimester.  Although she hasn't felt the baby kick yet, she's looking forward to that wonderful moment and I told her about how I could even feel my kids hiccuping when I was pregnant.

And then she said to me, "The other morning, I woke up and felt like it was okay to be really happy again." 

Generally speaking, I think there are two kinds of people in this world--those who feel things intensely and those who don't.  I am the former.  My husband is the latter.  It seems like it would be easier in some ways to feel less.  Life is full of tragedy and pain, both on a global scale and on a very personal level.  If you're less sensitive, I imagine you can look at your hardships, whether they be poverty, illness, or simply a bad breakup with your boyfriend, and assess them in a relatively dispassionate way, mediate them, and move on.  For me, the moving on is hard, and if I don't permit myself to feel my pain, it becomes even harder.  Non-feelers (for lack of a better word) can be uncomfortable with the expression of pan in ways they don't understand, so if you have a lot of non-feelers in your life, it can make it that much more difficult to do this work.  And face it--pain sucks.  You wake up every morning wondering how you're going to get through the day, whether your pain will ever cease weighing on you, and if it will ever go away.

But the flip side of the pain is the bliss--those days when you wake up to a world fresh with possibilities that are just waiting to be discovered.  When you feel that you are EXACTLY where you're supposed to be in life's grand scheme.  When you're energized and things are ridiculously easy to navigate.  When you feel like laughing just because you're happy.  For all of the troughs we experience in life, I hope there are at least as many peaks, if not more.

My student and I talked about this, how feeling pain made the joy you experience in life more acute.  And it's true.  If life were always wonderful, you wouldn't know it.  Tragedy is the universe's way of making us realize how lucky we really are.

William Faulkner wrote: "Given a choice between grief and nothing, I'd choose grief."  So would I.  I can't imagine a life without those days I saw my student experiencing on Friday.  Grief is difficult, soul-sapping, and tenacious, but without it, I wouldn't know happiness.  I haven't experienced much true bliss for the past few years, preferring instead to anesthetize myself in a fog of sugar and fat.  I did this to numb out the grief, but it mired me in nothingness.  Now, as the fog lifts, I can see the possibilities in front of me.  They were there the whole time, and they'll always be there.  I just have to find my way to them.