Pilates & Yoga for life lessons

It's past midnight, so it's officially Valentine's day. And as of a few days ago I am officially single for it. Hooray!

The past few days have been hard. I'm not sure who I want to share this with. I'm not trying to convince anyone, reader. I know they've been hard. I'm not trying to convince myself. Sometimes I find myself wanting to tell him, which is silly, because he knows this too. I wish I had more friends nearby. But I am grateful that I have wonderful friends to call on for strength and motivation and validation, when I need it, even if they are scattered around the country and the world.

But you know what, I feel good. My muscles are very, very, sore. I've kicked up my workout game a few notches. Hour long Pilates sessions every day, no excuses. Yoga afterwards. I'm finding that Yoga helps a lot. When I'm left to my own devices I'm very fidgety. Practicing Yoga, pretty much any pose, really centers me. If it's easy, that's great, and I give myself a pat on the back for being more flexible than I give myself credit for. And if it's hard, then I will be more flexible tomorrow. If it hurts, tomorrow it will hurt less (except in some cases, when it hurts more before it hurts less - gotta love those).

Pilates and Yoga keep me disciplined, they keep me focused on myself and on becoming better every day. I'm committed to this now. And I try to bring the lessons I'm learning into the rest of my life. Like I said, if it hurts today, it will probably hurt less tomorrow. And if it doesn't, I know that over time it will go away and it will make me stronger. Soon, I'm going to be okay. That's my new mantra. I cried all of Wednesday night, all of Thursday, and some of today. I'm a little ashamed, though I know I shouldn't be and I'm trying not to judge myself. But I'm going to be okay. I feel this with certainty. If I can keep moving, and not collapse onto the floor (which I admit I did on Wednesday when I got home), then I will be okay. It will all be okay. With or without him, or anybody else. Because I am with myself.

Corporate America or your happiness?

I am on the cusp of becoming a corporate sellout. Let me preface this by saying that I don't mean this to be a rant about my job or company specifically. I, like most people probably, want my company to flourish in the market and enjoy the hoi polloi's goodwill. Mainly for selfish reasons but also because I think the leaders here at some level care about the right things - personal development, employee satisfaction, corporate social responsibility, etc. And I enjoy working here as much as I believe anyone can enjoy working in a corporate atmosphere. I truly believe that my company is one of the better ones to be at, from a personal and professional point of view.

However. That is not to say that of all the life choices one could make, having a corporate job is the most satisfying. When I first forayed into the grown up world I had this idea that your career and your life purpose should be one and the same, and that this is a very realistic goal. A couple months in and I realized I was an idealistic youth with misplaced ideas about happiness. There is no way that this job - or any corporate job - can become my life's passion or a source of perpetual contentment for me. Running system tests on a sales application in no way trumps the very real and meaningful experience of training a puppy at the animal shelter or serving food to the homeless. To compare the two ways of life would be ludicrous. I thought about quitting and working at a non profit - I was actually told by an executive that that would probably make me very happy - and then the same executive told me I would probably earn about a quarter of what I currently make if I did that. And that is the grim truth about Corporate America, friends. They buy your soul in exchange for pay raises and flexible work hours and dental.

It's hard to crush young people's ideals. Let me tell you. I am a vehemently idealistic young person. Nearly two years into working full time I am still convinced that this job cannot make me, or anyone, truly happy. Up until a few weeks ago my long term plan was to quit eventually to go back to school and/or do something more fulfilling and altruistic with my time. And then something terrifying happened to me. A finance manager asked to reschedule a meeting I set up with him because this is a busy week for finance - this is the time of year when all the executives go back and forth over which projects need to be funded and finance has to figure out how to orchestrate it all, essentially - and I found that I was interested in the process. Not only because it impacts me (now I have to reschedule my meeting!) but because I was genuinely curious about the timeline and deliverables and how it all works. So I walked over to my colleague Lacey's cube and had the whole process explained to me very thoroughly. Then I walked back to my desk feeling very happy and satisfied with myself* OH MY GOD I'm becoming a cyborg.

My dream of going back to school, making the world a better place, and finding true fulfillment in what I do with the majority of my time is at war with the practical side of me that knows financial stability and health benefits are somewhat indispensable commodities. It is very tempting to pay off my college loans and buy an overpriced Kate Spade handbag. Is that settling? What do you think?



*Not, like, a deep and abiding satisfaction with my contribution to this earth. This is the empty corporate version that you experience when you understand a particularly convoluted problem that could only ever exist in Corporate America to begin with.

Portrait

Come in from the snow and take off your boots otherwise you’ll get frostbite and your little toesies will fall off, you don’t want that, good girl…and now the other foot, there and now mumma will make you a castle by the heater.

The grey sofa cushions are very much taller than her and they make a cozy fort to keep the heat in nicely and she can feel her toes again and it is almost her favorite part of playing in the snow except for when her father pulls her around the block in her sleigh. The sleigh is red and it is new. Except sometimes Sean comes too and he is mean so she does not like him. But her mother has told her she must be nice to him because it is Manners and besides his parents bought the light blue and dark blue house next to hers. Her house is red and green and white and there are wild raspberries in the backyard and a big mulberry tree on the deck. When the berries fall on the deck they make a dark stain and her father can get very angry about that.

She is given her berries to eat in the kitchen which has a shiny white floor. It does not stain. She knows because she has spilled berries on it before. And when her grandmother cleaned it up her mother had said Don’t Spoil Jahnavi.

*insert cryptic Joyce-like diamonds*

It was warm under the blankets. So warm that she did not want to get up, but her mother was talking to her softly and she knew that it was time to get ready for school. Her mother had laid out a pair of jeans and a yellow shirt with a sunflower on it for her to wear after she showered. Her mother was very keen on showering in the morning. So was her grandmother. Something about energy but she never had much energy to begin with, at least according to Miss Sellers. Miss Sellers was always telling her to Look Alive in Gym class but she wasn’t quite sure what that meant. Honestly she wasn’t quite sure what to make of Miss Sellers either, who had very short hair and kind of looked like a boy. But her mother said Miss Sellers was definitely a girl. But it was still hard to believe sometimes because why would a girl teach Gym. Anyway, she was pretty sure she was alive even if Miss Sellers didn’t think so. And running around the field for Exercise was so very tiring, especially in the sun. Besides, if she ran an entire lap then she had to pass the big gray house behind the trees on the far side and all the older kids in the fifth grade said it was haunted. And she knew that the fifth graders were always right because they were so much taller than she was and kids didn’t lie to other kids the way grown-ups sometimes did, like when her father had told her he wasn’t divorcing her, only her mother, but then he still moved into another house and he only took her around the block on Thursdays and only if she rode her own bicycle, which was hard and sometimes she skinned her knees.

Picking the dandelions that grew along the edge of the field was a lot more fun than doing laps and that was how she had met Samantha, who didn’t like Gym either. Samantha’s mother was a hair cutter and sometimes she did free haircuts for Samantha’s friends. One day she said Do you want a haircut Jahnavi and Jahnavi said yes, and after that she always got free haircuts and she and Samantha were best friends.

After she had put on the shirt with the sunflower on it her mother gave her a glass of milk and a jam sandwich and drove her to school. School was very loud because of all the kids screaming and running around like little angry heathens and she really didn’t want to go, but her mother had to go to work so she squared her small shoulders under her big backpack and got out of the car. She allowed herself to be buffeted along towards the stairwell, which was where Ms. Fraser took attendance before everyone got to go into the building. She tried to stay by the wall and remain inconspicuous but somehow she found her path blocked by Ryan Emery, who said nastily Your head’s so small, I bet your brain is really small too. There’s no one with a smaller head than you. She looked up at him and tried not to have the afraid expression on her face. He was very much taller than she was but he was not a fifth grader: he was in her class and mostly the only time he ever talked to her was to tell her that her head was too small. In kindergarten there had been a girl named Corey whose head was even smaller than Jahnavi’s, but they both knew that it didn’t matter how big your head was as long as you got A’s on the weekly spelling tests. And anyway Corey had moved away when they got to the first grade and Jahnavi thought that it was so sad that they didn’t get to enjoy being big kids together.