Dear Friend,
A yoga studio opened in our neighborhood last year. It was great — quasi-affordable with easy parking, a beautiful space, and a not-too-fancy energy. The teachers and owners were more into yoga than hype. I’m often attracted to people and businesses who give their passion for craft top priority, but I’ve also finally come to accept the hard truth that one cannot survive by substance alone – some hype is required. This yoga studio was terrible at self-promotion. They didn’t have a sign you could see from the street or even from the plaza parking lot. The only way to know it was there was to be there, inside the building, at the door of the studio. When, for want of traffic, the yoga studio closed down this month I was not surprised. But I was sad.
It was with reluctance that I returned to LA Fitness —which lives in the same building as my defunct yoga studio but definitely doesn’t have the same signage problem—but a couple weeks in, I’ve chosen to decide that it’s for the best. The switch brings substantial cost savings and though I’d been telling myself that yoga and walking was working cardio and strength, my first class back at the gym delivered the clear message that I hadn’t been working cardio and strength enough.
Once again the universe has saved me from coasting along complacently by discontinuing the situation that was allowing me to coast and giving me the opportunity to use muscles I’d apparently been neglecting. (Thanks universe!)
Now that I’m back to working out at the gym and it’s working out. I’m hoping things work out as well with two other items that have been recently discontinued:
The one facial moisturizer I’ve ever found that moisturized my face without making it break out.
As I come to the end of my plastic bottle, I find myself thrown back into the moisturizer dating pool after assuming I’d be happily, thoughtlessly married for life. What do you think? Should I try to replicate what I had before? Or taking into account that my skin and I are different now from when I was in my early thirties, should I look for something different…maybe even better?
The job I was leaning on for financial stability.
I’ve been “perma-lancing” for a large company, producing internal events, and thought I’d found an ideal life balance: I could spend half of the year doing production work that paid well enough to subsidize spending the other half of the year working on creative projects that pay poorly. That is, until the company decided to move a large portion of their events work in-house, decreasing their use of their entire stable of free-lancers (including me) by about four months next year.
What will that mean? Definitely some bobbing-and-weaving, using more muscles and cardio than I’d planned. And deciding whether to look for something that has worked before or cast about for something different.
At meditation camp, our teacher, Goenka, liked to pepper the Pali word “Anicca” liberally through his lectures. It refers to the Buddhist concept that everything is changing all the time.
Nothing is permanent. Not jobs or face creams or yoga studios.
But something always comes next.
Here’s hoping that all the changing things in your life are working out!
B
(P.S. Here’s a link to a little video I made about my yoga studio back in summer. Even then, I could see the end coming.)