107. Don’t Make It Harder

Some wisdom from Nora, that she stole from a yoga teacher.

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

 My friend Kate Baer, a poet but not in THAT way, you know the way, where you instantly feel dumber and like you should know more about poetry?? She’s the kind of poet who makes you feel like you GET poetry. That LIFE is poetry. That we are all poems, finding out way onto the page. Kate said to me, “I am a very dumb soul.”

And I laughed so hard. Not an old, wise soul. A young, dumb soul. I felt that in my bones. Because I am that kind of soul. I am a soul who has to learn things the hard way. Many, many times. I am the bird who keeps flying into the glass.

I am the woman who keeps putting her hand on the stove and saying “man, that’s hot.” “Wow, that burns.” “ho boy, I’m losing a lot of skin.” “This can’t be good.” 

But I keep touching it. I keep slamming my body into that pane of glass, willing it to be a tree-filled sky. 

I will learn the lesson, sure, but let’s make it as hard as possible. That, of course, is what makes it worth it? Worth what? We don’t know. 

The story I am going to tell you happened in a yoga class but PLEASE don’t turn this off. Just like Kate is not the kind of poet who makes you feel stupid I am not a person who is going to tell you to do yoga. I mostly don’t do yoga. I go once a week, to the same class at the same time, taught by the same teacher. I haven’t been to a yoga class for several years and at some point, I’ll stop going to this one and then in a few years I’ll rediscover yoga only after several months of a purely sedentary lifestyle, the kind that medical professionals warn against, the kind where you can feel your bones and joints stiffening, fusing together, the kind where you think, should I…maybe, get up today? 

And I’ll be back on the mat. In some other class. Hating every minute of it, craning my neck around to see if there’s a clock I can watch, and then, when it’s over, thinking…okay, I should do that again.

I like this teacher because she is just a regular person. She plays music that isn’t too yoga-y, she explains every movement like I am an alien visiting from outer space which MAYBE I AM! My pattern recognition is almost zero, so it doesn’t matter if we’ve done something four times already, I don’t know what it’s called or what we do, and she was walking through one of these moves, and explaining where our hands and our feet go, and in the midst of explaining this, she gently moved my arm from where I had placed it to where it was meant to go and said, “don’t make it harder.”

The class moved on, but I obviously did not, because I wrote “don’t make it harder” on a post-it and stuck it to my computer monitor and it’s not even in cute handwriting, it’s in my TRUE handwriting which is urgent and scattered.

I don’t know what “don’t make it harder” means to you, or for your life. Maybe it means you don’t send that text, or that you do. Maybe it means that you decline that invitation, or you RSVP with a yes and know you’ll irish goodbye within 20 minutes of arriving 20 minutes late. For me it is a break from flapping against that pane of glass, permission to let myself sit on the window ledge and nurse my dumb little wing if I have to. It’s a reminder that we don’t get more points by creating or amplifying our own discomfort, or for contorting ourselves into a shape that doesn’t even make sense. Because life is hard enough, going to yoga is hard enough, being a person is hard enough…don’t make it harder.