I am writing this morning from the room that was once my nursery. When I return here, my bones settle a little into an indescribably felt sense of the familiar. When the herringbone floors creak in this old apartment, I can feel the five-year-old me tiptoeing around, having been told not to wake Mom and Dad before 7. The distinctive squeak made when I turn on the hot water tap in my bathroom lives inside my ears. As I ease into wakefulness this morning, I notice that the clinking glass and rumbling engine of early morning garbage collection and the steady hum of traffic outside are a nursery rhyme that lives in my soft body. What it says: “You are safe in bed. Outside, all is unfolding as it should.”
Here, too, still, is Dad. 90 years old. But very much himself. Reading The New York Times in the kitchen. It’s hard for me to describe or even fathom the role that Dad’s consistency has played in my life. My mom, who passed years ago, was constantly reinventing herself. I don’t fault her for that at all. I’ve just come to recognize that Dad’s steadiness, reliability, and confident presence have contributed to the default setting of “safe” in my nervous system.
In a constantly changing, impermanent world, this consistency feels like a great gift.
It also feels a little dangerous for me to be enjoying it.
Later in the day, we catalogued together 96 items in the apartment that Dad would like to stay in the family after his passing. Each one came with a story. Many of these objects have been part of the landscape of my life for as long as I can remember.
I am appreciating this time together. I am trying to appreciate without clinging. The ephemeral nature of this time contributes to my appreciation of it. Knowing that something cannot last is part of what allows us to love it so fully.
I’m here because Dad isn’t feeling well. He’s not terribly ill, but he’s not his usual robust ball of vitality. I am watching him suffer mostly because his body is not meeting his expectations. His consistency has helped me, but I’m not sure, in this moment, it’s helping him. The steadiness I have always counted on in him may be making it harder for him to accept what is happening now.
I find myself considering the difference between stability and permanence. One is a quality we can cultivate within ourselves. The other is something life simply doesn't offer us.
It doesn’t matter what I think. What’s happening is happening. All. The. Time. Sometimes change is simply the nature of life, and sometimes it is the rug pulled out sharply from under me, leaving me splayed out on the floor with crumpled bones. And sometimes change is experienced as a breath of cool, fresh air wafting over my face when I’m gasping, allowing me to finally fully fill my lungs.
Somehow, we have to find a way to metabolize it all. To make room in our bodies, our hearts, our very sense of who we are, for a life that just will not stop.
Yoga has helped me so much with this. The wisdom and teachings around nonattachment and impermanence, yes. But just as much, the embodied practices. Our bodies hold it all: the bumps and the terrible blows and the warm hugs and kind words too. As I move and breathe and with intention, I find that some of these impressions begin to soften, shift, or settle. Not always, and not all at once. But through consistent practice, over time, I have come to trust that this integration process works.
Here is the potential for a different kind of stability. Not the security of things staying the same, but a growing capacity to remain steady, open, and present as life unfolds. To appreciate without clinging. To love without demanding a promise.
And then there is the deeper teaching of yoga, the one that lives in me in glimpses and glimmers: beneath all this movement and change, there is something that remains. An awareness, a presence, an essence that is not bound by the circumstances of our lives. The part of us that witnesses all the changing.
And I find great comfort in the possibility that this swirling life that I love fiercely is not the whole of it.
