Tuesday, April 16, 2013

We need to be bored.

Detoxing from school and work and tv and friends and even husbands is an experience. When you're used to living with a person, and then it turns out that they're not going to be living in your house for four to five days out of seven, things get a little weird. Coming home doesn't seem to be such a big deal. Leaving home doesn't seem to be such a big deal. Sleeping in a dark room does. I've spent time lying on my cold, laminate floor. I feel as though when I am bored, I stretch. So I've gone to two moderately expensive yoga classes. Both times the instructor has come up to me and tweaked my positioning in downward facing dog, or simply lying on my back, tucking the shoulders. That's it, he says. He kept on saying, today, to not think about anything. To simply let any narratives that occur in the brain to pass on by. To be in the moment.

Well I certainly haven't detoxed. I've watched a few movies, that weren't very good -- one just for the sake of knowing I'd see Johnny Depp (worthy enough excuse if you'd ask me). I've picked up and set down books that I've bought, not quite ready to take them on. I'll walk in circles for a while, maybe clean something, avoiding. I've opened and closed the balcony door.

Boredom produces the realization that habits are important. Habits such as taking the time to take a yoga class, or to help push someone out of the ruts in the back alley, or to talk to a friend that hasn't been spoken to in a while.

At youth the other night a girl said to me that God's rules aren't fair. It's reminiscent of the film Chocolat (2000) I watched, where the town is subject to a mayor who ensures everyone goes to church and is consistently abstaining, abstaining, abstaining. For ----'s sake, if you want to swear, swear, if you want to get drunk every Friday, get drunk, if you want to sleep around, or live with the person you love, or watch R-rated movies, do it. By no means do I view the Bible as a rule book -- though I certainly used to. It's about health. It's about putting things into your body that you want to take out. It's about becoming what you eat: Large piles of sugar, harvested by poorly paid workers. Guilty women facing themselves in the mirror and saying lesser than. Angry youth pointing fingers at happy youth for leading self-destructive lives. It's not about what you aren't doing.  

Not that I'm one to talk. You hold guilt in your hips, and my hips are not very flexible. Today, in a hot yoga room, my face near the my mat, smelling like the bottom of my feet, the relaxing gong music, the heavy breathing of the woman on my right, frizzy hair, not caring, letting my mouth open the way it does when I truly relax, I didn't care when he said that your feet shouldn't be tingling at all, I was stretching further than I ever have before, angry nerves or not, relishing in the anxious hip, like pressing on a headache.

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