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I opened my mouth to tell her absolutely not. That I had too much work the next day. That I was tired. That the idea of doing yoga in the dark before dawn sounded like a total suckfest. But she was holding my arm, her white-blonde hair escaping its nighttime braid in frizzy puffs and curls, like the plants on the High Line, and her strangely colorless eyes looked like twin moons, yellow-gray and luminous, and I started to smile.
“Okay, sure. Why not.”
“Yes!” Gretchen’s excitement was reward enough. She squeezed my arm in triumph and tipped her chin up to the night sky.
AS WE walked down 14th Street in our yoga clothes, sipping coffee and eating cinnamon bagels, Gretchen said, “It’s strange to see the city this early in the morning. It’s so empty, it’s like everything’s still asleep.” And I nodded at her, but was struck by the intensely dislocating feeling that hit me whenever I was reminded how staggeringly different people’s impressions of the same thing could be.
If Tonya was surprised to see us, she didn’t show it, just nodded warmly and smiled. There were only three other people there, clearly regulars by the way they greeted each other silently and settled onto their mats with none of the chatter of our usual classes.
The yoga studio had windows on one side, and Tonya had us positioned so that we were facing them. Her voice was serene, almost lulling, where usually she had more energy.
“In the Yoga Sutras, we find the principles of Abhyasa and Vairagya. Practice and nonattachment. Practice means always showing up to do the work. Putting forth effort. Nonattachment means letting go of the outcome of that work. Letting go of the things that prevent us from seeing ourselves clearly—fear or pain, expectation or pleasure. We observe those things, and then we let them pass us by.
“Together, we can express Abhyasa and Vairagya as ‘Never give up and always surrender.’ Always keep striving in the direction of what you want to bring into being. But recognize when you’ve done all you can and have reached the moment to surrender to the outcomes of that work. The moment when doing more becomes detrimental to your efforts.
“In practical terms this might look like riding your bike up a hill: you have to pedal hard, hard, hard enough to get the bike to the top of the hill. But then, when you start to crest the hill, you can stop pedaling. Stop exerting effort and surrender to the way gravity will carry you down the other side. Recognize that in fact the attempt to keep pedaling when your wheels are moving so fast is dangerous and won’t serve you.
“This is the balance. Never giving up in working to achieve what you desire. Always remembering that sometimes the outcome of your work can look different than you expected. And sometimes it might give you things you couldn’t have anticipated. Let’s practice with that in mind today.”
I’d been thinking about my physics project so single-mindedly that physics was where my brain went naturally. Though I’d heard Tonya use the phrase “never give up and always surrender” before, the bike metaphor somehow made it stunningly clear. Because that was just physics. But as I moved through sun salutations—which definitely felt a bit more salutatory in advance of the actual sun—I kept thinking of her words in terms of Will.
How I’d done the work. So much damn work, if I was being honest. And it hadn’t gotten me what I’d wanted. It hadn’t gotten me Will. Not an acknowledged monogamous relationship with Will, anyway.
But the part about surrendering to the unexpected things that the work can bring about stuck with me. Will telling me that I was his best friend. Telling me that I was the first one he called when shit went down with Claire. That I was the one he wanted to tell when good things happened. Showing me that he trusted me more than he trusted other people, let me in farther than he let in others. That he cared about me.
I wondered how many more things like that I’d dismissed or undervalued, too distracted by the fact that I wasn’t getting the results I’d set my sights on. How often important, meaningful, real things had slipped away from me, unacknowledged, as I measured only their distance from what I’d wanted.
They were unrecoverable losses. But maybe things could be different going forward.
I could be different.
We moved from Standing Split to Warrior III and finally settled in Warrior II, sinking deeper and deeper into the pose as the sun began to peek up over the buildings, spilling its rays down on the waking city below.
At the end of the class, the sun had fully risen, appearing to rest in my hands like a child’s ball, as if we’d dragged it from the very depths of the cosmos with our outstretched arms, all laws of physics shattered in the wake of sheer perception and will.
