Some days it's just good to be alive

Today I felt something I haven't felt for a long time. Maybe it's because I saw the changing colors of the tree leaves, maybe the lack of oppressive humidity in the air and glorious sunshine, but as I tooled around the highways in Columbus listening to my mix CDs I couldn't help but thinking it was great to be young (relatively) and alive in America. My husband and I have been having a love/hate relationship with our country ever since he got back from a recent work trip in France/Switzerland. I've always dreamt of living over seas, or pretty much any place but the midwest. Since he's returned, the sense of urgency to get the heck out of the heartland has become more and more pressing; not only would it seemingly improve our quality of life, but also my health, considering that when I tell doctors that weather fronts trigger my migraine headaches, they always say that I should move from Ohio.

But today that urgency to flee was nowhere in my heart as Cat Stevens sang of lost love and John Lennon crooned to Yoko and I drove my little sports car from the perkily manicured lawns of houses that bordered the country club where I'd given a private yoga lesson to a gratefully jet-lagged student who'd just flown back from German. Normally I might have judged her for being overpriviledged and wondered which gas guzzling SUV out in the parking lot was hers. But she was a student and had come to me to ask me graciously to help her work out her tight hips and hamstrings. I had to tell her to stop apologizing every time I corrected her. "There's no apologizing in yoga." I said.

As I drove home, buoyed by my love for teaching and the brilliant blue sky and the temperate air and mellow music, I wasn't bothered as I normally was by suburban surfaces turning to industrial and post-industrial wasteland through more suburbs toward the northern semi-decrepit not quite suburban neighborhood where I live. It was ok that it wasn't some other place, but this place, with the front step that was crumbling so badly that I kept telling my husband that it was hazardous for older people and the slightly handicapped and old windows and manner of things that needed cleaning and painting and the yard that was mostly weeds. I was happy that I could let the dogs out to lie in a patch of sun in the middle of the yard that was otherwise a shady ravine. I opened all the curtains and windows that I had been keeping shut because my ragweed allergy had kicked in this year and let the breeze waft as pleasantly as the thoughts in my brain through the house.

So this, I realized, is what Tim Miller means when he speak of equanimity. We don't live in a perfect world, I had told a friend of mine just the night before. We don't have to run around like self-important entitled ego-maniacs grasping for pleasure at every moment, nor do we have to ruminate on the failures of our: society, country, government, president, personal situation, mental status either. We can just be in the world, not of it. But it sure doesn't hurt when it's a beautiful early autumn day and life, like the midafternoon breeze is feeling particularly soft and easy.