Follow the yarn!

Photo credit: Booker T. Sessoms, 2022

Life is infinite. The great churning, expanding, receding rhythm of the world, the tide of breath and loss and becoming. But our lifetimes? Our individual paths through this infinity? Those are most definitely finite.

I sometimes imagine life as a great ball of unraveled red yarn. We spend our lives rolling it back up, inch by inch, turn by turn. We don’t know how long the yarn is or where it leads, only that it’s there, and that we’re following it.

On the routes I take daily—my walk to the market, my loop around the park, the corner café where I order the same coffee and croissant—I think of the yarn lying in parallel lines on the sidewalk. Each pass I make over these places, I gather up one more thread. One less line remains.

As we enter our final two months in New York City, I feel this more keenly than ever. I know—for a fact—that some of the places I pass through only have one last line of yarn left for me. One last visit. One last folding into the spool of memory. Other places, I just don’t know. Maybe I’ll pass by again someday, unexpectedly, like finding a familiar scent in a different country. Maybe not.

There’s no tragedy in this. Just the simple truth that our lives must come to their ends. We don’t know when. In fact, yoga teaches us that we only can know this very moment. We can feel our fingers in the yarn right now, our feet on the sidewalk, our breath rising and falling with the rhythm of wherever we are. Presence doesn’t stretch the yarn. It doesn’t rewind it. But it allows us to walk each line with open eyes, with softness, with gratitude.

There is no way to know the length of the thread. There is only this: follow the red yarn, pay attention, and notice the beauty each time you roll another line back into the ball.