On renewal and loss

Photo credit: Booker T. Sessoms, 2022

The urge for renewal has been with me for years.

In many ways, I have followed it: training to become a yoga instructor, starting a coaching business, winding down activities and connections that no longer felt true to who I am.

I am proud of these shifts. I have always had a hard time saying good bye, always held on for slightly too long, always maintained the illusion that “if only” I do things “right” then this action, this relationship, this habit will be as I imagined it. That, somehow, something not functioning optimally (or even at all) is squarely on me.

And so learning to let go, learning to see things clearly and make grounded decisions about what I can and cannot do… well, that’s been huge!

And yet. As I am preparing to leave the city that has been my home for the majority of my adulthood, as I am reliving the many lives I have had in this place, as I mourn the people and places I might never see again, I suddenly feel the full weight of emotions I thought to be long resolved.

One of the founders of modern yoga, B.K.S. Iyengar, writes movingly about his wife’s death, about the mourning that cannot truly be mourning because we are all ephemeral and transient. I can’t do his thoughtfulness justice, because I already packed that book. But I remember the feeling I had when I read it: the absolute certainty that what he says is right, and also that I personally will never be able to practice detachment to that degree.

I know of course that I am in charge of the leaving here, which is a privilege beyond compare. And I also know that there are no guarantees. Change is constant, and at the moment I am sitting squarely in a maelstrom of movement and loss.