Actually, "lost" is mother-of-a-toddler code for, "I left my cell phone in the pocket of the shorts I wore to the pool with Jake and ran it through the washing machine." Raz-r phones, I probably don't have to tell you, do not like being run through the washing machine.
When Mike first announced that he had found my cell phone resting amidst the tangle of damp clothes waiting to be transferred to the dryer, I had a brief, flickering hope that all would be fine. I admit, shamefully, that this was not the first experience one of my cell phones has had with water. My former, L.A. Raz-r phone once slid neatly out of the back pocket where I had tucked it and into the toilet one unfortunate morning last spring. In an amazing stroke of luck that happens only once in a lifetime, when I called the cell phone company to report my "broken" cell phone, the dot under the battery that tells them when someone has dropped her phone in the toilet had not turned a tell-tale red, so I got a brand new replacement phone free of charge. Audrey, our bloodhound mix, chewed it up the next day, but that's another story.
As I said, such strokes of luck rarely occur twice (even when arguably neutralized by a hound dog with bad chewing habits). This time, the dot was a bright, accusing, you-put-me-through-the-washing-machine red.
You'd think I would have sprung into action replacing my cell phone. But I felt unaccountably relaxed about the whole project. The only person who ever calls me on it is Mike, and while I do love touching base with him during the day he has managed to catch me on the land line frequently enough to allow the week to start dwindling without my really questioning his decision to see if the phone might come back to life, as a friend of his claimed his once had.
By the time the weekend arrived with no real action taken, I had missed a message from the mother of Jake's first girlfriend in Long Beach and was beginning to feel a bit remote. And sad that I didn't have her number written down somewhere so I could call her back the old fashioned way. But, after all, the only time I had for returning calls was when I was walking Jake somewhere in the stroller or driving to EarthFare for groceries, so, absent my cell phone, I couldn't very well return it anyhow. Since Mike and I were having our very first non-relatives-over-for-dinner social event Saturday night, I was willing to let the weekend pass without making that crucial contact with someone who knows me better than is possible from a few casual conversations on the sidewalk in front of the house.
It wasn't until Monday, when I was caught between waiting at home for the return business phone calls I was expecting or getting out of the house to run crucial errands, that I began to wobble. How, I fumed, am I supposed to carry on with my life when I'm stuck at home waiting for the phone to ring?
Never mind that we used to do it all the time. The world has changed, and so has my ability to wait a little bit longer for the information I need. Finally, at the end of an otherwise admirable week of almost carefree cell phone-less-ness, the loss of something as un-yoga-like as a cell phone was making me lose my mind.
When Technology Makes It Hard to Surrender
Happily, a colleague of Mike's magnanimously offered to give me her old cell phone and, miraculously, the Verizon store switched it to my line free of charge. (Apparently they would have charged me to transfer all the information from my old phone to my new one if they had been able to turn the old one on. Thanks to its dance through the washing machine, that was impossible. And so, my friends still awaiting return calls from me, you might want to email me your number.)
"You did it," Mike said when I gleefully called him from the mall in front of the Verizon store. How had I lasted an entire week without walking around while talking on the phone?
"Thank you so much," I crowed. "Take Jane out for a nice lunch to thank her for the phone."
So thrilled was I with my return to a modern life of cell phone chatting in the mall that I found myself at a make-up counter in Dillard's buying myself a new lipstick. It has been years and years since I stood at a make-up counter in a mall buying myself a lipstick. But sometimes the world catches up with us.
Life, in short, was back on track. I had cell phone service and all was right with the world.
Until our internet and land line went out the next day.
At first I thought it was just the phone. In fact, I thought it was just that Jake had left one of the phones on, therefore tying up every other phone in the house with a "line in use" message. Wearily, I managed to track down every last phone. Methodically, I turned every phone on and off. I worked the bases. I tried the phones again. Nothing. Then I tried my computer and the true magnitude of the disaster began to dawn on me.
Even when you work at home, one day without checking email is doable. Especially when you have had a full day out of the house, no pressing work to do, and the exhaustion that comes with having a full day of activities planned before picking up a toddler from preschool.
By yesterday, however, I was feeling rather moved to get online and do some work. Not only was YogaMamaMe languishing, but it was just possible there were some important emails awaiting my perusal.
So I set off to a local coffee shop with free wireless, paid three dollars for a lemonade, and settled down to work, thinking maybe I ought to get out like this more often.
With great skill, I found and connected to the free wireless. I tried to access my email. "Unable to find server," the screen informed me.
I tried again. And again. I asked a nice man working at a laptop at the table behind me if there was a password I needed. He assured me there was not and even took a quick glance toward my computer with the intention of helping me figure out the problem. Until I informed him I had a Mac, and he backed away.
I moved to a different table, pushed keys, and scanned pull-down menus in the hopes of figuring out the problem.
In the end, the best diagnosis I could manage was that I had a Mac and everyone else breezily surfing the net had Windows systems. So I gave up.
It was as I drove home, utterly defeated, that the tears of rage started busting past the things I tell myself to cope with frustrations such as these. "I don't want the Universe to make me take a break!" I whined. "I can't take today off too! It. Just. Isn't. POSSIBLE!"
This was the moment—these minutes of fighting the Universe, battling surrender, refusing to let go—when I realized it was a mighty good thing there was a yoga class starting in 45 minutes and that, yes, I would be there and not cruising the streets of Asheville in the hopes of finding a coffee shop where I could take advantage of the free wireless.
The Urge to Battle Surrender
Why is it that sometimes it's harder to surrender than other times?
Sure, in a yoga class we're already primed to surrender to the fact that laghuvajrasana just isn't happening today. And sometimes—say, on a sunny Saturday when we'd much rather head to the beach—we can surrender to the fact that the traffic on the highway is so bad the only reasonable course of action is to ditch the plan to buy a ladder at Lowe's with which to clean the gutters.
But there are more challenging times when, with practice, it is possible to see that everything will be just fine if, for example, we are forced to go without a cell phone for a week. I could, after all, call in for messages. If I was missing a phone number stored only in my defeated Raz-r I could look it up, Google it (well, okay, only because my cell phone and internet weren't unavailable to me at the same time, which I concede would have been a disaster), or email the person a response (ditto). As for those precious chunks of time I was out of the house while someone was calling me back on the land line—sometimes things move more slowly than we're used to, but it really, truly doesn't make a bit of difference in the end.
I've had a lot of practice surrendering. As has anyone who, say, has gone into labor. Don't get to choose when that happens, do we? (Yeah, it is possible these days, but that's just another example of the ways in which we think we're in control, when the second that baby's out in the world he'll show you different.) So, too, the cable company (can't they do better than "between 8 and 12 on Monday"?), traffic jams, and retired parents remind us that we don't get to control everything in our lives. The more we try, the more frustrated we become, and somewhere along the line, if we're lucky, we'll learn first-hand about the relief of surrender.
But then there are the times when we reach our limit. For me, it was after five solid days of doing nothing that could properly be called work. That I had chosen to treat myself kindly and take a break from work for the first three only made it that much more of an imperative that I GET BACK TO WORK even if circumstances were making that impossible.
What did I think would happen if I waited another day for an internet connection? Oh, I figured YogaMamaMe would be over before it started, I'd miss out on a juicy legal project, I'd fall so far behind on my emails that my friends would all abandon me and I'd really find out what it means to be isolated with only a nineteen-month-old for company.
All the sorts of fears that diminish with a few hours of sleep and some perspective. But all perfectly justifiable. Because fear is justifiable—we feel it, we react to it—and fear is what makes it so hard to surrender.
What will happen if I let go? I'll lose control! All I've worked so hard to accomplish will be jeopardized! Probably not, but you don't know because it hasn't happened yet. Plus, that illusion of control is so darned strong. We contribute to it by working a regular work week like the rest of the world—even though it's just as easy to turn on a computer on Saturday as it is on Wednesday, or would be if you didn't know that no one else in the world is sitting down at their computer to do work on a beautiful Saturday when your partner and child are having fun at the pool. We make appointments, and use TiVo to get around the need to sit in front of the t.v. when the networks tell us to, and, yes, carry cell phones so we can multitask and get home in time to dance to the musicians on Live from Abbey Road with our toddler.
But we're not in control. We're not in control just as much when we find it difficult to acknowledge we're not in control as when we are able to. All it takes is another reminder, a little bit of kindness, and a lot of practice. A few persuasive phone calls to AT&T don't hurt either, since my internet has been restored as I've been writing this.
Agnistambhasana (Double Pigeon or Fire Log Pose) -- Practice Struggling with Surrender
For a very, very few of us—perhaps people like me who spent their entire childhood and adolescence doing homework on the floor folded over crossed legs—agnistambhasana (more commonly known as double pigeon or fire log pose) is a joy of deep surrender. For most people, however, it can be a struggle, which is why, naturally, I offer it here.
Double pigeon, as I like to call it, is an intense hip opener. But it is also an opportunity to treat yourself kindly, as you can use all sorts of props. In the initial stages it is about surrendering to your body's limitations, understanding that it really doesn't make a bit of difference whether you will ever be able to do the pose without props, and beginning to open to the possibilities of letting go of the past. We store past emotional hurts in our hips, which is why most of us have such tight ones and why we often find hip openers so challenging. It's hard to let go of stuff that hurts.
But beyond the practice of surrendering in mind, double pigeon ultimately offers a lovely way to surrender in body. Get past the struggle with your mind and you find a deep, delicious opening within a protected, comfortable pose.
I recommend it for any time: while watching t.v., before going to bed, while meditating in the morning, and—some advice I would do well to heed next time—when your internet service goes out.
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