“Life is amazing. And then it’s awful.
And then it’s amazing again.
And in between the amazing and the awful,
it’s ordinary and mundane and routine.
Breathe in through the amazing,
hold on through the awful and
relax and exhale during the ordinary.”
– L.R. Knost
Summer has been the best of times
I consider myself very lucky that summer break is still part of my life. No matter how much I love teaching, annually, the advent of summer brings up old, deeply imbedded emotions. The excitement and anticipation of summer was second only to Christmas for me. And I loved (and still love) school!
When I was a kid, summer felt magical. It was a time when anything could happen; when anything was possible. The days were wonderfully long, allowing more hours for fun with the kids in my neighborhood than we knew what to do with. Summer was a time for allowing life to flow as it would, moving from one activity to the next guided only by what sounded most enjoyable or exciting or amusing. Can you still remember the thrill of days like that? Summers, as a kid, were amazing.
Summer has been the worst of times
For the last several years, my summers have been filled with crises. Since my brother died in late June of 2020, summer, which had always been a happy season, has been a season of fear and sorrow, worry and panic, and so much hard stuff that must be done that the pace and tasks of the school year have seemed wildly preferable. Summers have definitely not felt magical recently. In fact, they have been pretty awful.
Summer can also maybe just be an ordinary time
Yet this year, I once again feel a quiet thrum as summer begins. It’s not the thrill of anticipating something amazing. It’s thankfully not the dread of something awful. It’s the hope of stretching out into ordinary, mundane life. It’s a deep desire (perhaps need) to exhale and reset. Interestingly, I also yearn to feel at the end of the day the pleasant, tired ache of a body that has worked hard in ordinary, routine ways.
For most of my life, I did not spend my summers looking for a (pleasantly or not) tired body. Long vacation days on the beach or hours drifting on a lake in my family’s boat have been my favorite ways to find relaxation and rejuvenation. They were for resting. Perhaps, this particular summer, days like that hold less interest for me because I am not looking to escape my regular life? Instead, something in me yearns for the exact opposite – to be deeply rooted in my ordinary life.
I want nothing more than to be digging and weeding and smiling as I watch life unfold in my garden. To spend hours washing, sanding, and painting as I slowly restore and repair my beloved white picket fence. I haven’t once chosen to listen to a podcast as I work. There is something profoundly stabilizing, settling, and simple about being entirely present to what I’m doing. More than once I’ve cleaned up my tools and thought, “Now THAT is what the very best yoga practices feel like.”
The liturgical season of Ordinary Time guides our attention to our ordinary life
The Christian season of Pentecost or “ordinary time” began this week. For decades I have noticed and marked the church’s liturgical seasons. I have embraced the anticipation of Advent, the sweet joy of Christmas, the disciplined preparation of Lent, and the exultation of Easter. Yet, I will confess that, until this year, Pentecost has not felt particularly noticeable. It’s felt a little humdrum – as if it’s the part of the church year that is not “special.”
This year, however, Ordinary Time is exactly what my heart yearns for. Diana Butler Bass, in introducing Pentecost in her book, A Beautiful Year, encourages us to “see miracles in the quotidian.” To do so, we must be practicing mindfulness in the familiar. We must, as I was last week, be paying such keen attention that when our first bean pokes its little green head through the earth, we dance with exultant joy – and then drag every member of our family and unsuspecting friends to the garden to see and celebrate with us.
Ordinary life is amazing and awful and everything in between
Ordinary time, it turns out, can contain amazing things. It can also contain disappointments (the birds plucked my sunflower seeds right out of the ground) and frustration (I cannot for the life of me get the power washer to start. I have to ask for help every time). I believe ordinary time is offering me the opportunity to remember that life is typically fluid like this – not stuck at all, but flowing from amazing to awful and back again. Perhaps this summer is a chance to practice breathing in through the amazing, holding on through the awful (or the merely frustrating), and relaxing and exhaling when given the chance.
No matter how you feel called to spend your days, I hope this summer season offers you many chances to do all three – but especially to exhale.
Ram Dass, famous yoga teacher, psychologist and writer, titled his seminal book Be Here Now. This is, in essence, what Patanjali is trying to teach us how to do in the Yoga Sutras and his eight limbs. We humans are free from suffering and life is fulfilling when our entire focus is on this one present moment. Just as staying focused on and content with ordinary life doesn’t mean you won’t have frustrations and sorrows along the way, being “here now” does not mean that life won’t be painful at times. However, it does mean that we will avoid the suffering that comes from wishing life is other than it is. This is why Patanjali opens his work with the admonition, “NOW begins the teaching of yoga.” Yoga cannot be practiced or bear its gifts in the future or in the past; only now.