for cripes’sake, look BOTH ways
One Thursday night in October, I was manning the front desk at om time Boulder. Shannon came out from her class with a huge, heavy looking statue wrapped under her arm. Fascinated and still new to this whole “yoga” thing, I tried to stealthily sneak a peak at the figure;
A woman riding a tiger.
Ah. Okay. Of course it’s a woman riding a tiger.
Always addressing a hundred things at once, mid-conversation with another student, Shannon sharply shot a glance at me over her shoulder. I immediately pretended like I had not been staring at her tiger-riding woman with all the extra arms.
“You have to clean your altar tonight, Elle. Don’t forget. It’s the last night of Diwali.”
The look on my face must have been an oblivious blank stare.
“You do have an altar, right?”
Continued blank stare.
“Oh my gosh. Elle. Tonight. You HAVE to set up an altar. It’s all about setting a space for manifesting and change and moving forward.”
“Well,” I finally managed to stammer, “I just moved into the new house yesterday…”
“Perfect!” She slapped her free hand on the desk and smiled at me.
My new roommate texted me as soon as I got off work that night. “What are we doing tonight?? Wine??”
“Sure!” I replied. “But first I have to build an altar.”
I didn’t get a response back.
An hour later, I was frantically digging through half-unpacked boxes in my bedroom. Altar, altar, altar… what exactly DOES one put on an altar? I had no sacred little statues of women riding large jungle cats or holy incense to burn. But I did find a little table and a scarf that had a tag that read “Made in India”… this was surely a good start.
I found a sweet card my dad had written to me prior to my final musical performance in high school, a washcloth knitted by my nearly-blind great-grandmother when she was 92… and slowly but surely I felt my altar was picking up speed. I lit a tea-light and hummed a couple Om Namah Shivaya’s and felt wholly satisfied that I had effectively cultivated a sacred space in my new room. Everything else sat around it in a state of complete dishevelment and upheaval, but there was a bright feeling around that little space in the corner.
I came back to the front room after my anxious completion of altar-ification and wanted chips and salsa. The third roommate wanted pizza rolls, so her and I decided to take a field trip to the grocery store. I joked about how excited I was to actually be living IN Denver, where the grocery store was a mere three minute drive away. Out in the country where I had been living with my parents made it more difficult for late night junk food cravings, what with all the dirt roads and loose cattle meandering about past dark.
On the way home from the grocery store, a man on a bicycle came flying out of an alley. I slammed on my brakes and narrowly missed him, my heart pounding and my hands shaking.
“Oh my GOD – that was no cattle…!” The roommate and I began giggling. “Man, seriously – I guess I’ll have to watch out for those crazy bike-riders out here….”
I gently began to accelerate again, and not fifteen feet down the road, another bicycle came flying out of nowhere from my right. I was barely back up to 15mph, and slammed on my brakes again – but hit his back tire with the driver’s side bumper of my car. As my car came to a halt, I watched his little body fly off his bike. I pulled my emergency brake, flipped on my hazard lights, opened my door, and held my breath. Staring in disbelief, I waited to see if he was moving. He moaned, my roommate cussed, and I said, “Are you… are you okay?”
“Si, si. I okay, I okay,” replied the slowly moving little body. I stood up out of my car.
“No, but seriously – are YOU okay? I mean, are you OKAY?” He picked himself up off of the ground and began brushing himself off. I walked over to him and grabbed his hand. “Are you alright?”
With his other hand, he began brushing across his body as if taking stock on all the parts. Everything seemed to still be accounted for, and he traced his hand over his face. “Oh my gah. Ohmygah ohmygah ohmygah…” He was shaking, and I pulled him in and hugged him.
“You scared the crap out of me, kiddo.” I realized we were both shaking.
“I sorry, I so so sorry,” the little Hispanic teenager kept repeating.
“YOU’re sorry! I just hit you with my CAR!!”
I kept trying to ask him questions, but between being so shaken up and having limited access to the language, he was having a hard time answering with detailed descriptions of how he was. He looked down at the mess of a bike, picked it up and tried to fix the obviously broken brakes. Frustrated, he tried to ask me if I knew how to fix the bike. I told him I didn’t, but that I was so glad he was okay.
Suddenly abashed, he glanced up at me. “My fall?”
“Um… yes, you fell.” I started to worry that maybe he had knocked himself slightly senseless.
He shook his head. “My fall?”
“My fault, I think he’s asking,” my roommate said.
“Si, my fault?” I took one more glance at his bike, and for the first time noticed the beer can with a bendy pink straw in the cup-holder, its contents splashed across the road.
Suddenly a little irritated, I replied, “Oh. Well, ya. Yes, you have to stop at the end of an alley to look both ways before you cross it. You have to pay attention when you’re biking in the dark!” I nodded down at the drink, wordlessly making my final point.
As we were loading his bike into the back of my car and gathering our new friend into the backseat to take him to his friends’ house where he was staying, the man who had been on the first bike I almost hit came back.
“Man, I’m so sorry if I scared you, pulling out in front of you like that. I should have been paying more attention…” he went on.
I was suddenly so thankful – had it not been for me slowing down out of surprise for him, I may have hit the second kid head on. Dead on. “You actually probably just saved this kid’s life,” I replied.
We dropped him off at his friends’ and made sure everyone was alright. The bike was broken, but he was okay, and we all agreed that’s all that really mattered.
Pay attention. You never know what’s going to jump out and knock you on your butt if you’re not looking both ways before you cross a juncture in your life – especially if you’re taking the one less travelled by. You know, the one in the yellowed wood and all… You can prepare yourself for change all you want, planning out exactly how you will complete it, taking every precaution into consideration – but sometimes the most unexpected can come out of nowhere and set you back. There is a certain turmoil and discomfort associated with any transition in life – the level of such pain and disarray will vary and you never know until it flat out hits you.
And in the mean time, the things that seem to set you back indefinitely as you move towards that new goal may actually be there to keep you on the right path. Don’t damn them until you study them, wonder why they have presented themselves to you, celebrate them for what other suffering they may be inhibiting you from encountering.
Life can come at you going a million miles an hour and hit you like a freight train. You can either be upset about what it destroyed around you or celebrate what you walked away with. When life shakes things up, it is really shaking things away from you. And as you sit in the midst of the mess, looking out at all the little pieces your life seems to have shattered into, you are given the blessed opportunity to take the things that matter. Pick up the pieces that are worth salvaging and let the others fall away.
And as a packrat, I truly believe it’s the only way a lot of us can learn. We become too attached to too much; attached to relationships that are detrimental to our emotional health, attached to jobs that drain us dry, attached to basements of stuff we haven’t been through in years. Sometimes it takes catastrophe to remind us of the things that are truly worth holding on to – like the friends that are there to comfort us as we mourn, the family that supports us as we try to keep our head above water, the memories – not the STUFF – that are always with us.
Transition isn’t easy. New beginnings aren’t easy. And it’s because letting go to the past is rough. It’s the hardest part. It’s letting go of the pain of being hit with an opportunity for a new beginning and finding that that which you previously held on to isn’t there to hold on to anymore.
It’s building a new sacred place in your life to move forward from now. And it’s adorned with things from your past that empower you. And it’s about learning from the thing that scattered everything else away.
And so, here I sit at my altar, watching the last of my tea lights this evening burn away. And I realize there are things here that no longer empower me. It’s time to let it go, because something has hit me and I’m lucky to still be as strong as I am.
And so are you.