New Year's Resolution

Arriving in San Francisco to respond to my parents' simultaneous health crises (see previous post) was like landing on Mars without going to astronaut school. I knew no one, had no authority to act on behalf of my parents, had no experience dealing with such dire events, didn't even know how to drive my parents' Prius and didn't know my way around in any case. I was so panic-stricken by the urgent and continually unspooling demands that I couldn't eat, couldn't sleep, couldn't think. I wept uncontrollably—in Whole Foods, at Staples, in the street, to any stranger who would listen. I worked from 6 every morning till 10 every night, trying to offer comfort, put in place a care-giver apparatus that would outlast my stay, and make notes for my brothers, whom I was counting on to relieve me.

Despite what anyone would acknowledge as a job well done, I was overcome by a sense of failure since I had not accomplished a long-term solution. My mother will survive her broken knee and her stroke, and my father will survive his broken ribs, sacrum and pelvis, but they are not in an affordable, safe living situation, and they will injure themselves again. 

Two people, both friends of my parents', shared words that saved my sanity. Both of these FOMPs said essentially the same thing. One wrote me an e-mail that read: "Remember, regardless of how hard you try, many things are out of your control. Just take it day by day." Acknowledgment that things were out of my control was comforting, perhaps because it absolved me of responsibility. Another FOMP, a native of India, gave me a lift home after I bumped into him at the skilled-nursing facility where my father was undergoing physical therapy. He said that in Eastern philosophy, there are three secrets to life: "right" work, "right" means—and letting go of the result. I was doing right work with the right means (aside from the whining and blubbering)—but I was clinging to a result, and that was driving me mad. I can't say these two conversations brought immediate peace of mind, but they helped. And both are magically in sync with yoga philosophy.

So my New Year's Resolution is simple and singular and diabolically challenging: to live my yoga every day, on the mat and off.