Now, we start over
Photo credit: Tanja Hoppmann, 2023
If you get lost, don’t panic. Retrace your steps back to the beginning and start over.
This was the advice my mother gave us as kids. It was the 80s in Copenhagen. My brother and I were not yet 10 years old but spent a lot of time out in the world alone: walking to school, picking up groceries, taking public transportation to visit family, playing in the nearby parks.
It is solid advice too. I remember feeling inklings of panic whenever I had made a wrong turn, then quickly realizing I wasn’t lost if I knew how to get back to the beginning. Retrace your steps and start over, I’d tell myself. That’s not really being lost, it’s ultimately just being late.
I think about this as I move through the various poses of my daily asana practice, feeling into each variation. Every day, my body feels different, every day there is some part of my practice that is unknown. I explore the outside of what I can do, today, then retreat to the familiar flow: tadasana (mountain), uttanasana (forward fold), ardha uttanasana (halfway lift), chaturanga, urdhva mukha svanasana (updog). It feels safe and known, a rhythm that holds me even when my body aches and my thoughts race.
I also think about it as I brace myself for the news in the morning paper. It is hard not to panic. We are lost, I say to myself. Every decision along the way compounding the first wrong turn. The privatization of housing, of water, of care. The investment in weaponry. The criminalization of empathy and love. We have doubled down on these paths since we started recording human history. Maybe we are not so much lost as deliberate in our dehumanization. Maybe we believe the stories we tell ourselves.
What is the equivalent of a familiar asana flow here? When it comes to war, discrimination, and poverty, what does it mean to go back to the beginning and start again? I try to think my way to the answer, but it is in my body, not my head. We have the ability to return to what has always worked: love, community, care. We have the ability to be present with each other and the pain and joy we each feel. That is where we came from. Now, we start over.
