When I started teaching yoga in my community, I had a set idea of the perfect space—the building, the color of the paint for the walls, where to put the tropical plants, how to hang the art. I found the space—it was ready to be rented on the cheap, fixed up, and filled with awesome people doing awesome things. Then, sigh, the landlord just wanted someone to fix up the space so he could move a business into it 2 years later (huh?!). Bummer for me.
I really had my heart set on that perfect space, and the disappointment dragged me down for a couple of weeks. Then I started applying my yogic thinking to the situation. Maybe the flub was really a fantastic opportunity to be a lot more free, to be a lot more creative.
I already have what’s needed: students, their willingness, our mats. It’s just a matter of showing up. No matter what the space looks like or where it’s located, the framework is the same: a teacher and students creating a practice. So we’ll have class wherever we can, playing a bit of musical yoga. A bed and breakfast, a neighbor’s seaside terrace, the beach. Who cares? What matters is that we’re showing up and cultivating a practice.
Realization #1: Once I freed myself from striving for a preconceived perfection, I could welcome the unperfect, which is itself perfection.
I’m inviting this realization into my broader worldview. How often do I stop myself from acting upon a wish, an idea, a plan because of some creation in my mind of perfection—an intangible, unreachable place? Pretty danged often. And it results in if-only thinking. “If only I had this amount of money…” “If only I had the time…” “If only I could do…” If-only’s mire me in excuses for staying glued to the set picture, leaving me unfulfilled and wondering.
From now on, I’m dropping the “If only.” I’m far more interested in what I can in this moment do with what I have. Altering the perspective from the impossible to the possible eliminates a whole lot of doubt and anxiety. There’s no more binding myself to self-imposed constraints on what indeed can be achieved.
Now I’ll take an even wider stance into my worldview. When I talk to people about redefining politics, I’m often met with shaking heads. “It’s just not possible,” I’m told. The range of reasons typically flow from “We’ll end up in chaos” to “There are too many worker bees who’ll go along with what anyone tells them to do—you’ll never change anything.” These aren’t reasons but classic if-only style excuses. Sometimes it’s comfortable to stay in dysfunction because it’s familiar and known. It’s comfortable to tell our angry selves we can’t do anything about wrongs in the world. It’s comfortable to believe we’re smart while everybody else is stupid. The huge if-only problem here is a failure to see the structure that divides and categorizes us so we can’t imagine what lies beyond it.
Think of the concluding scene in “The Truman Show.” Jim Carrey’s character comes to notice the pre-fabricated borders in which he lives. Instead of opting for the familiar, which started driving him bonkers, he opted for the adventure of the uncertain. He sailed to the edge of his world, literally found the exit door, and walked through it. (The 15-minute lead-up to his escape can be watched here. If you’ve never seen or heard of the movie, read this first.)
Let’s not forget that people once believed the world to be flat. Sailing past a particular border wasn’t considered an option. Until somebody considered it and then risked the uncertain.
Realization #2: We must risk the uncertain. Uncertainty is the freedom we’re looking for—if we can allow ourselves to see it. If we allow ourselves to see that what we believe to be safe is not at all safe.
Not knowing gives us the space to discover what we can create, what we would like to know. There’s no perfect way to go about it. We can’t say it’ll result in chaos because, quite frankly, we don’t know. Chaos is mistakenly placed on the altar of Scary. Yet often times disorder ushers in beautiful freedom.
Galileo conceptually rearranged the solar system, earning the ire of religious leaders and upsetting the day’s mainstream thinking that our universe revolved around Earth instead of the Sun. Walt Whitman smashed his era’s rules of poetry to invent free verse. In 1872, Victoria Woodhull ran for US president alongside her vice-presidential nominee, the former slave Frederick Douglass—48 years before women could vote, long before Civil Rights laws, and 139 years before Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama appeared on the scene as Executive Office candidates. Jackson Pollock broke the constraints of easel painting with one glorious and accidental dripping of paint. So, what can we and will we contribute to humanity in our lifetimes and beyond?
Big ideas can seem scary at first. But we gotta get over the abyss of Impossible. Our yoga practices prove to us time and again that Impossible is a transitory state, a place we pass through to get to that other, more liberating place. When it comes to redefining politics, Impossible, too, is a state of mind.
