Insomnia everlasting

I’m an insomniac and always have been. Even as a child, I would lie awake and worry. What does a child have to worry about? Infinity. I still get anxious at the notion, but when I was, say, 10, the idea of time everlasting was terrifying. I would lie in bed and throw my mind further and further into the future, not imagining what it would be like so much as trying to find the end and failing. Or I’d pitch myself into a bottomless well and fall slowly into the vast nowhere. Boundless outer space—cosmic torture. 

Infinity still bothers me, but now I know to stop at the precipice and will myself to worry about other, slightly less disturbing things—like the fact that I cannot remember the name of a movie I saw a fragment of the night before, or the words I said in good humor that could easily be misconstrued. Such things still keep me awake, or maybe I worry about them because what else are you going to do while you’re lying awake. 

Turning down the heat

Although I have certainly felt from time to time that I was burning in the fires of my own private hell, it turns out that as the term “sandwich generation” suggests, I am not the only piece of lunchmeat on the grill of caregiving. 

And it turns out that none of us are completely satisfied with how we’re doing the eldercare slice. Those who have lost a parent (or two) are burdened with regrets that can never be resolved—a father’s pain that went unaddressed, say, or a mother’s loneliness a daughter was too busy to assuage.

Both my parents are still alive, so I have an opportunity to avoid such regrets. My trouble is that I still struggle with adolescent anger. I continue to repeat to myself and others the story of the abusive behavior of one parent and the enabling of the other. But those horrors are now more than half a century old. The people who inflicted them on me were younger than I am now, and every cell of their bodies has been replaced since then many times over. They are no longer the people who did me wrong. (Though they sure do look like them.)

So lately I’ve been trying not so much to forgive the people that they were but to love the people that they’ve become. Ironically, love in this case means maintaining emotional distance. I can appreciate my mother’s rampant stubbornness and my father’s tax-time OCD only when I don’t feel trapped by them. So I professionalize my relationship with them—when I have the wherewithal—by refusing to rise to provocation or, really, engage on any level. Oddly, this has allowed me to say—for the first time in decades—“I love you.” And mostly, I mean it.

Dachsund Day in Washington Square Park

Iyengar

Essentially, the hour-and-a-half level 1 class consisted of three poses, with variations: parsvottanasana, supta padangusthasana, and pashimottanasana. Static poses but with so many nuances that it was both intense and fascinating. I think I’ve found my second home!

Unbearable adjectives

Add a couple of hyphenates to the list of loatheworthy language

1. go-to
2. must-have

Sandman in Washington Square

Yoga in the naked city

I’m a yoga whore. I have no loyalty, and I’ll try anything. There seem to be 8 million yoga classes in the naked city, and in my month of semi-retirement, I’ve made headway into trying them all.

I’ve been a yoga whore for a long time, so I was already familiar with a number of studios: Ellen Saltonstall (my home base), Shala, Maha Padma, Integral, Ishta, Vira, Jivamukti, the Om Factory.

But with time on my hands and frugality in mind, I wanted to try others. First I went for bargains:

*$10 for a week of all-you-can-eat yoga at Yoga Vida—O.K. if you don’t mind meaning-of-life sermons from 20-year-olds and classes with 50 or more Lululemon-clad students

*$25 for a week of unlimited classes at Atmananda—O.K. if you get Jhon and don’t mind some military-style barking in classes so small you feel like a heel for being a cheapskate in a studio with a concrete floor painted black and ceiling lanterns that look like the pods from Invasion of the Body Snatchers

*Pay what you want (I paid $5) at Yoga to the People—Smells like teen spirit when the guys take their shirts off

*$12 for Sivananda—Classical but rigid

Except for the fact that I’m 63 (and most of the students in these bargain-basement classes look 18), I feel like Goldilocks. Next up: the Papa Bear of yoga, Iyengar.