My daughter, the yoga prodigy, can lie on her stomach, arch her legs over her back, and touch her heels to her forehead. And she can stay like that for a while.
Me -- not so much.
So I’m continuing to bring inflexibility to a yoga studio near you. This week, a quandary: typically, every day I can generate some self-deprecating story that amuses me while illustrating approximately nothing, but this week I didn’t do anything phenomenally stupid in yoga or piano. I do have a mountain of laundry in my kitchen, though, and my kid has eaten pizza twice this week, so at least I’m failing as a mother. More to the point, what the heck am I gonna write about?
Tuesday, while I was utterly failing to follow the simple instruction to reach around and grab both ankles, I got hold of my trouser leg instead -- closest I could get. Lisa said, “Nice modification.” Right -- that was a switch from trying to get somewhere through sheer willpower to getting somewhere close enough.
I was thinking about this today as I was leaving my piano lesson. Carla’s an amazing teacher, and I’m absolutely loving coming back to something as an adult that I barely tolerated when I was a child. Three weeks into this adventure, I’m starting to see how I can encounter music in a really different way than I have before. My piano teachers in childhood were very interested in my playing the right notes. One of them had a pointer with which to whack your fingers if you played a wrong one, which encouraged accurate sightreading. Carla was trying to get me to be more expressive in one of the lines of the piece I was playing. I could understand what she was saying, but it almost seemed like she was inviting me to break the law -- to bring in dynamics that weren’t marked there. I’m certain if I’d had the extensive training of a real musician, or if I had grown up in a different part of the world or something, I would have found out before being halfway to my grave that one can do such a thing. I can hear that performances of the same piece by different artists are different -- what did I think was happening, I wonder?
But that turned my mind to nice modifications. I make these kinds of accommodations all the time with my child -- I was going to read her the riot act over some petty sin, but then I see she already feels worse than I thought it my duty to make her, so I moderate my words and tone of voice to emphasize not her fall from grace, but that she is already climbing back up.
It’s easy, or easy-ish, anyway, to do that with your child, this little person who’s been entrusted to your care, who thinks you’re the most beautiful person ever no matter what you look like, for whom Mama’s disappointment is the worst thing in the world. It’s hard to turn that spirit of charity toward yourself, I think, to make the nice modification that lets you forget all the voices that bring inflexibility. Virginia Woolf explains her mother’s harshness toward her sister Stella by noting that Julia Stephen thought of Stella as “a part of myself.” Reading that again this week, I understood that “With malice toward none, with charity toward all” is not just a nice turn of phrase from a dead president; you have to include yourself in the none and the all.
Meanwhile, my sweet little girl has been playing piano for more than an hour. I have to go tell her it’s time to stop so she can do her jobs: am I lucky, or what?
