Is There Such a Thing as a Full Circle and What Does It Look Like?

I hung up the phone yesterday thinking I had come full circle.

We hadn’t spoken in nearly twenty years, and I wonder how long it’s been since I’ve heard the laugh that brought me right back in a joyful slide to the summer I turned seventeen.  That laugh, I now remember, made me feel like I’d found a new and happy part of life.

I was at that awkward age where you want to be more grown up than you are, which maybe accounts for how I’ve more or less rejected the idea that there is anything serious about myself that I’d like to hold onto from those days.  My narrative of that summer has always been about a girl filled with more naivete than a Los Angeles teenager probably should be, a dreamer who hadn’t yet bumped up against the realities that ultimately flattened her dreams and propelled her to law school and decades of searching for the feeling of that laugh.

And now, in one of those rare instances where Facebook lives up to its potential, I had a fresh perspective on a set of memories I’ve pored over a million times.  Maybe, I considered from the vantage of this YogaMamaMe place I’ve made for myself, I wasn’t as naive as I’ve assumed.  Maybe the dreams weren’t born of youthful stupidity.  Maybe, just maybe, they simply became obscured by a life in which I stepped tenderly and then forcefully away from my heart.  And now that I am back where my heart wants me to be, I have, I concluded, come full circle.

It’s an appealing picture, one in which an old friend becomes a new friend and our friendship a bookend-ish symbol of the insignificance of the journey between the two points of his laughter.

The picture is also, of course, just plain wrong.  Because I haven’t really come full circle at all.

Memories Are in the Mind

It could be that I’m a bit confused by having just finished reading The Night of the Gun, David Carr’s reportorial memoir in which he tries to write about his past and mostly ends up questioning the whole concept of memory.  Appealing to the former academic in me, I’ll admit, but completely beside the point.  Because all this stuff about memory is just a bunch of thoughts teasing out other thoughts and leading to yet more thoughts.

Which, as we all know by now, is not what yoga is about.

Rather, yoga is about that moment when my friend laughed, a few months after that first tentative Facebook contact, and I felt, just, happy.  I think I told him I was “tickled,” which is embarrassing but true.

I sent the friend request in December, feeling for all the world like a stalker and admitting as much in my message to him.  The truth is, he’s one of those people who has never left my thoughts for long, a genuine connection made during a summer spent away from home living in college dorms, taking college classes, and learning how to drink.  If you can count copious amounts of Kahlua and milk and of Southern Comfort and Coke — the summer favorites — as real drinking.

At the time, I was in love with him in that first love, sparkly, spinning way that has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with holding each other up as you stumble down Massachusetts Avenue on humid summer nights.

That love — and his friendship — sustained me through a restless senior year of high school, caught between my first taste of college and my longing to escape fully into it. I sent him countless tortured short stories I wrote.  (I’m trying to recall how exactly I sent them to him in those pre-email, pre-PC’s days.  I don’t remember having access to a copier.  Did I retype them and send him the original pages in thick envelopes?)  When he showed the stories to his mother she asked him if “this Melissa is kind of depressed.”  Which gives you a pretty good idea of what those stories were like.

He was my excuse for squirming out of a suggestion that I go to the prom with a guy who didn’t particularly like me but hung out in the same crowd I was trying to distance myself from.  It wasn’t like either of us had anyone else to go with, he shrugged.  “My friend might fly in from the east coast to take me,” I lied, and then pretended it was true.  Several more fiascos later — involving a guy who I did say yes to, another I thought I was dating and therefore going to the prom with instead of the guy I said yes to, hurt recriminations from both of the boys who had actually asked me, a blow-off from the one I apparently wasn’t dating, and the desire but not the guts to cancel his tuxedo order at the last minute –  I ended up asking one of the sales clerks at the men’s clothing store where I worked after school to accompany me.  I wore a long, stiff, strapless white dress — white has never been my best color, but apparently I didn’t know that at the time — and flowers in my hair with the peroxided streaks at the temples.  It was not the stuff prom memories are supposed to be made of.

The plan was for us to go to college if not together then at least close by.  Or that’s what I thought the plan was.  I made it to New England, where he lived, and he, sadly, headed down south, where, interestingly (I’d say “ironically,” but I’m pretty convinced nothing is actually ironic) enough, he went to school with my law school boyfriend.  They didn’t know each other, but the scant connection further knit together the long-running theme my mind constructed in which we belonged in each others’ lives.

I saw him a couple of times after that, the last just before I started law school.  I’d like to invest that fact with meaning — the moment I turned my back completely on the writer in me.  If my life were a movie, that would be the portent.  But, of course, there was no such uber-meaning, which is the point I’m tortuously making my way to.

Life isn’t a movie.  It isn’t a story.  This nice, linear narrative I’ve created where I find myself on the phone summing up the last twenty years as if they were all leading to my life at this moment is just the structure I’ve imposed on the places life has taken me.  A good story for an old friend.  A still-exhaling sigh to let go of all the choices that I’ve decided in retrospect were wrong but also right for leading to this particular place.

A full circle of my own creation.

Where’s the Yoga in All This?  or, Why Am I Sharing this Story?

I just paused to look at my daughter sleeping in my lap, her slack cheeks falling peacefully over her little chin, her face framed by a fuzzy pink and green blanket and her head topped by a striped, peaked cap.

She’s the point of what I’m trying to say.  So is how I felt when my friend laughed and I remembered the seventeen-year-old girl who once knew him and dreamed of being a writer and was kind of naive for a Los Angeles teenager.

It’s not that the twenty-five (ouch!) years since then disappeared like the tesseract in A Wrinkle in Time, folded under so the two points — the summer we spent together and the half hour we spoke yesterday — meet.  Those twenty-five years are still there, still important, my path, even if it’s not a linear one.

But as I summarized them for him, where I found myself — and what he heard — was how happy I am in the present.

And that — with everything it carries with it — is the point.

That’s yoga.  And parenthood.  And how I’m trying to bring the two of them together.

I haven’t come full circle because the present moment — that which we try to find in a yoga practice — is always informed by the past.  I can’t be in the exact same spot I was in twenty-five years ago because the intervening experiences are part of my present.  Everything I’ve done and been is part of who I am.

That’s kind of terrifying, given that I spend so much time bemoaning the lost person I’ve been for so much of my life.  But, see, once again I’m imposing some narrative on what was a simple present at the time.  I was happy plenty when I was wearing a lawyer’s suit, even if in my heart I knew it was not where I should be.  I laughed and did community theater in between the panic attacks that overtook me in graduate school.  I made dear friends and discovered yoga and fell in love while I was living in St. Louis and chafing against the law school professor I had made myself into.

In other words, much of the practice of yoga is learning to let an experience be part of us without reevaluating and retelling it.  Is this possible — to not judge ourselves?  Hardly.  But the practice is very possible.

It’s easier to grasp when we’re talking about meditating or practicing asanas.  Then the point is to be in the present moment, let go of thoughts and judgments.  Great.  But why do we do that?

We do it to wend our way toward our authentic selves, the place to which our hearts are leading us.  And isn’t the past part of that as well?  The past is not merely the path to where we are now.  The past isn’t an unfortunate series of events that we hide from friends like the high school yearbooks that show us in all our 1980’s hair glory.  And it certainly isn’t something that has no bearing on who and where we are in the present.

It’s all one, I think, our past and our present moment.  And it took my friend’s laugh to bring that point right home, to my home in Asheville with the maple trees in the front yard and the tin-roofed potting shed in the back and a family that is somehow — I gasp with the good fortune of it — mine under the roof.

Uttita Parshvakonasana (Extended Angle Pose) — For No Particular Reason

It occurred to me as I practiced asanas this morning that I haven’t suggested uttita parshvakonasana, or extended angle pose, in a while.

It’s one of those poses that can be really, really uncomfortable the first hundred or so times you do it.  And then, one day, it makes sense.  As I breathed in it, I tried to remember just how much I used to resist it.  And I thought abstractly about all the practices that went into making it feel pretty darned good to me now. Which is a good metaphor fo what I’ve been trying to say here.

But that’s not why I choose to offer it.  The offering is honestly pretty random.  Just haven’t suggested it in a while and think it’s a good asana tp practice regularly.

The explanation of how it fits into what I’ve been writing about?  Just proving my point.  That anything can be about this moment if you make it so.  And that it’s more important to be in the moment, to exerience it with all the complexity it entails, than to even try to explain it.

Uttita Parshvakonasana Instructions

Tagged as: old friends, past, yoga and motherhood