Simmer

“Wasn’t it great to have a snow day yesterday,” her words are more of a proclamation than a question. “I got so much stuff done!”  This was not my experience; I wasted massive amounts of time in frustrated hand-wringing over the fact that the weather spent the week dashing my best laid plans.  While I finally made it to my yoga mat to hear my instructor’s delight in this unexpected respite, all my attempts to attend exercise classes during the week were either thwarted or aborted by snow.  She spent her day in frenzied productive bliss; I wallowed, insipid and conflicted, unable to regroup with any kind of positive energy.

I’m an alpha dog, a friend observes. This is not news to me.  I used to think I just like to be in charge.  I’m discovering now that I have pretty much put myself in places where I am in charge.  This, I’m learning, makes me horribly out of practice in situations where I am second in command or expected to partner. And worse yet, I am dissident, defiant and literally unable to bear it when my partner doesn’t see it or do it my way.  How humbling and embarrassing.  Any skills in diplomacy, arbitration or mediation escape me. I am desperate to recoup them; the alternatives are non-starters. Submission leaves me feeling marginalized, dominance is hollow.

When I think about my alphaness, it’s more than not being able to follow along, it’s this feeling that my ability to put my time to my definition of “good use” is stripped from me.  I don’t know how to handle it.

Ambition is a cruel catalyst. There is so much I want to create and achieve in this life. I abhor what I view as the necessary nuisances required to keep me going. I have trained myself to shut it down and sleep at night only because my body flips on the irritation switch when I’ve been awake too long. It’s the same thing with eating.

I’m mad that my hips and knees won’t let me run anymore, as I believe this is the biggest bang for my buck when it comes to maintaining fitness.  It’s the original moving meditation and I’m bitter that this fulfilling practice is no longer an option for me.  I long for the “Born to Run” life of barefoot footfalls and chomping on chia seeds. And this alpha dog misses the family dog.  She was my reason for getting outside and walking at least once a day, if not twice.

I overhear my nephew in a conversation about Stephen Hawking.  His matter-of-fact comment is “the guy’s body just crapped out on him”.  These words come from an 18-year old who has never walked. What rich perspective.

I’ve been told I don’t like change. I ask myself if that’s really true.  I have weathered massive amounts of change, both forced upon me and ignited by me. The transforming is unsettling and emotional, but I can’t in all honesty call myself resistant.  Sure I wish I used the stereo enough to remember how all the buttons work.  Same with the technology in the conference rooms.  But I don’t think this is so much a resistance to change as it is a frustration with my own limitations and an impatience for any learning curve taking time away from my relentless drive to get to what is important to me.

Yoga is good for me in that it begs me to slow down and be kind to myself.  The 90 minutes is excruciating, not because the room is too hot or the exercise is too difficult, but because time is such a precious commodity.  Can’t I get the benefits without investing so much time?  The answer, of course, is no. The instructors always say the postures we hate the most are the ones we need the most.  Apparently I need the whole damn 90-minute experience. And so this is yet another gift yoga presents to me. It just may explain why I am compelled to go to class while at the same time repelled by the time it demands of me.

Maybe the lesson here is striving to create the best experience possible wherever life dictates I spend my time?  I don’t eat lunch with friends. Breakfast, if I eat it, is shoved down behind the steering wheel. People talk about sitting down at the family table for dinner at night, resurrecting this lost art of connecting over a meal. What if this happened three times a day?

The other lesson is gratitude. Every alpha dog doesn’t always get her day. But lots of great stuff comes her way every day. Maybe if she was brave enough to step into the paws of a beta dog or even an omega dog she would learn how to be instead of do?

Stephen Hawking says, “Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.”  A snow day seems like a safe place to start.