Apparently, the experience of riding fat bikes over frozen lakes (fat-ice-backpacking, to be specific) has something in common with Ashtanga.
Let me catch you up: So I’m reading Casey Lyon’s Backpacker article about this insane “why would you want to do that” trip these guys took, yes, over ice, on bikes, where “crashing is a a matter of when, not if” as I inhale the contents of my morning French press (welcome to my daily sadhana— it’s either this mag or the New Yorker, unless it’s bad beagle poop cleanup. Ice biking it is!) when I’m struck by this line:
“We also enjoy something else I hadn’t anticipated: Let’s call it the first-time filter. Everyone remembers his or her first kiss, first solo night in the woods. We don’t know what to expect and that changes our perception. It perks up the mind, breaks it out of that semi-trancelike state we spend our commutes and trips to the supermarket in, and causes it to write grooves deeply into our brains.” *
I get it. And I’m getting it –that is, a lot of first times– after oh, two years or so of the same, tired ass practice. Suddenly it’s raining postures! Ok, maybe not, but there these few newbies are, steadily streaming in since I got over that hump they call whatever your sticking-point-nemesis pose is (and everybody’s got one, right?) I finally landed mine: So here I stand, or, rather, contort, bind and roll, immersed in that experience of the never-done-that-before, the having no clue how it’s gonna go, the fumbling through ecstasy of foreign movement after years of the same. Never mind that Richard, Lino and countless others got there first: I’m a pioneer.
God that sounds sexy.
But truthfully, there is nothing old or tired-ass about the postures and vinyasas I’ve done countless times that came before these freshly unwrapped few. And more– these new postures? Oh, how quickly they lose that seductive allure! How quickly their shiny facades devolve into just the weird, the what the hell? And the why is this so much harder than it looks and who thought of this stupid posture and boy is it nice to do that primary series come Friday.
Still I confess: I covet new thrills.
I’ll never forget the first time I climbed up a 40-foot wall, terrified and in love at the same time. My first time on skis as an adult (and now an addict), just as I’ll never forget my first drop back, the first time I stood back up from a backbend, the first time I got those arms through my lotus legs in garba pindasana, the first time I fell over in forearm stand, landed my knees on my forearms, not to mention all those off the mat firsts: there is this rush of unexpected, kid-like joy, this moment of transformation, positive reduction to the state of a child who has just done, oh, well just about anything and proudly proclaims: Hey look what I can do! Or in my case, holy sh&t, I didn’t know that was possible!
So ashtanga would seem a dead-end for a girl like me, save for those blips of getting the next, shiny new posture. Otherwise, the practice is this daily, repetitive slog, the exact opposite of fat-ice-bike-backpacking in the dark.
But, no, with respect to those intrepid crazy dudes, it’s not. I’ve discovered entirely new frontiers and first time rushes in movements I’ve done for months or years: suddenly I’m jumping into crow pose not just passably but with, if i do say so myself, a bad ass bit of float; I might be able to grab my own shins in a backbend I’ve visited countless times, and hold the phone, just in the past few weeks I managed to land on my forearms with slow (ish), juicy control (as opposed to crash-bruising). And each of these discoveries rolls in with its own first time glow, born out of nothing new but shockingly, the same old love.
The reality is that nothing is the same old. Nothing is ever truly repeated; there is only the new, only change. This practice every so often just hits me, whoomp there it is-style, smack in the middle of my same-old daily choreography, with something trance-lancingly new. Hell, stagnancy is an illusion– you think you are standing still in samasthitih, but I’ll be damned if you ain’t moving: “We are, after all, inhabitants of a perpetually rotating planet”**
Indeed, I’ve been with the same person for over a decade, and I’ve trance-lanced my husband in what might look like a never-ending quest to freak this unshakeable guy out. In his words to me: “you’re not boring.” Just like the postures I do everyday, the people in a relationship are constantly changing. Let them.
Perhaps our attempts to force things into an artificial, static state is tantamount to calling for their death. Maybe we’re only as stuck as we tell ourselves we are. Maybe there is no end to firsts, even in someone or something you’ve known forever.
Just with its doing the practice changes, postures get added, series progress, and you break for a moment out of that semi-trancelike state you didn’t even know you were in. But even when I was doing the same moves for so long (admittedly, there’s been a lot of obvious change in my practice over the past six months, and i’ve never been held anywhere as long as some practitioners) there was still, nothing but new. Especially when I looked for it, but even if I didn’t– ashtanga smacked me in the face with it.
Look, that posture you’ve done forever suddenly morphing upwards is not exactly the same as the completely, freaking brand spanking new experience: like what I will feel the first time I backcountry ski or passably compete on American Ninja warrior (ha ha…wait, I might be serious) or that day we all arrive on Mars. I walk onto my mat with expectations, like it or not, a vision of how it’s going to go. But I do my best to let that sh*t go and just
let it rip.
I sit here staring down the homestretch of second series in a sort of disbelief. I sit here aching for some serious terrain (moguls! black diamonds!) I want the thrill of you under me so quite new, as e.e. cummings wrote. Careful: everything new becomes old news if you force it there.
So I’m gonna go out there, on my mat, doing exactly what I did yesterday, exactly as it unexpectedly unfolds today and–
I’m gonna find my first.
~~~~~~
- * “The New Age of Exploration,” by Casey Lyons in the January 2016 issue of Backpacker magazine. Related video at http://www.backpacker.com/view/videos/trips-videos/fatbiking-minnesota/
- ** This line appears in the form of a fictional letter by Alan Turing in the novel Speak by Louisa Hall, p. 173. The theme of motion in this unique book struck me and makes waves into this blog.