I got to work today and began to write an essay on the comparative benefits and costs of specialization and generalization in the future workforce. This evolved into a questioning of how our generation is supposed to decide what to do, faced with the current global crisis and our own bizarre upbringings in reference to the extreme pressure and scheduling, ADD fad’s, and divorce rates of our childhood. This all sprung out of a conversation I had with a friend about our plans for graduate school. This ended with an agreement of frustration that we are stuck between pursuing a life of simplicity and wholesomeness, full of gardens and family and writing and being good to our body and spirits, and a life we feel responsible to pursue, full of international service and application of our rigorous educations. True, they do not cancel each other out so to say, but we are in a time where we stuck trying to figure out what in truth is important to us.
I am entirely not alone, but it is not a particular generational crisis. Perhaps past twenty-somethings have not felt the enormity of the burden we do now, as their crisis were smaller, or just beginning. The baby boomers felt their international service was to bring awareness to the wholesomeness of life. Previous to that, there was perhaps no choice, as you were very much brought up in the life of the land or the life of the people. But now, we have seven million majors for undergraduates alone (number fictionalized), and so many possibilities that we can only conceive that the great pressure we were raised with to become the “ultimate generation” is only bottlenecking as we choose which school and for what we are destined.
These thoughts are so enormous that an essay surrounding it is a great project. So I began to think of yoga, which I do with anything enormous in my life. Last night I went to my first class in a week and it was hard. It centered on core strength and twisting, both of which are very necessary in my life right now. I am beginning to see how my strengths in yoga mimic my strengths in life, and how appropriate it is that there are things that are hard for me. I am twenty three, and backbends are particularly easy, which is only appropriate as I am in a place where not only is my spine flexible and still long by virtue of not being compressed over time, but I have the unique ability to not have any responsibilities that prevent me from bending over backwards for my goals. Balancing poses, however, are very hard. This is not because I do not have the strength in my legs, which perhaps may be true to an extent, but because I cannot find a suitable drishti, or a gaze that stabilized you. I have no patience to focus on one corner, and get distracted by another if I do. This unwavering focus at one point is what puts your mind in your body, rooting it to the ground, giving you the unremitting potency of stillness.
I think of this and realize, of course I cannot find a drishti! I sit here at my desk and torment myself over whether I should become an international environmental lawyer, or whether I would prefer moving to Vermont and teaching yoga while I write poetry and eat food from my garden. If I choose one then I must learn Spanish now, I must read all of Colman McCarthy’s reference books in his Peace Studies course, I must move to Chile and work with the Riverkeeper and before all of that, I must get the money to do so. If I choose the other, I must take deep breaths, scrutinize my internal life to a finely painful degree, get beaten by editors, go to teacher training, and relinquish the part of me that feels responsible to the world. How can I stand in half-lotus tree pose if I can’t even decide how to spend my money? How can I excel in dancer pose, with my leg flying over my head, if I cannot see what stratosphere I should be flying in?
The answer perhaps is simple, but to see that all of this needs so much more than just a steady gaze, but a rooted foot, and the contradictions of great strength and humble gentility. All balancing poses need a deep and stable ground to fly from, and a slightly bent knee when necessary. They take a spiraling inner thigh that is hugging your bones, and a scooped tailbone to protect your sacrum. They need a strong core to keep you steady. No asana is possible without the physical strength first (and this, of course, lends itself to another understanding of how strength develops from the relationship between pulling and pushing – opposites again). The drishti is what turns the potentiality of the strength in the muscles into the actuality of the pose, not the fairy godmother that makes a flexible person strong.
If I can pick a pose apart, I can pick my life apart too, and see that there are other things I need before I settle (and settling, even then, is not permanent. One often needs a different drishti for each pose, and a different one for every room). I can ease my worry by knowing that I may be wavering between goals, but if I have the strength first then once I find the common points between my passions I will find my true focus. I cannot be expected to know where I will be in ten years, and I cannot be expected to hold a pose when I am not ready for it.
So what are these common points? What could possible be shared between these two drastically different paths? Can I possibly trust the universe enough to know that if I focus on just these commonalities, that the rest will take care of itself, without me nitpicking at new courses in the community college, or networking? Perhaps I just need to understand that if I focus on my underlying passion, the courses and the networking will happen without me nitpicking. I will not have to think about the inward spiral of my thigh, or the strength of my abdominals, if I am focusing with stillness because they will happen through that focus.
We are driven by such muscle memory of persistence and pressure, having been told our entire lives that we will be productive and we will be influential, because we will do the right things. Even then we realized it was not our choice. Except through this it was someone telling us to do it, and we did, and now it must be us listening to ourselves and the world, and not our parents (which is much, much harder). How do we find what we do in our future? We find what we want to do now. How do we decide to take risks in our lives? We have no choice if it is a risk to take, if we are meant to do it then it will not seem risky. Patience is not a virtue we cultivate at twelve through classes, but it may be the only one that gets us past twenty four.
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