Break

Spring break! 

"I'm not making any decisions...except BAD decisions."

                 —Professor Dave, 2022.3.24

Happy birthday, Noodles!  

No one is better at throwing a party for oneself than an Aries.  

(I should know.)

Essentials

The full primary series (Yoga Chikitsa or “Yoga Therapy”) of the Ashtanga Vinyasa yoga practice as taught by the late paramguru Sri K. Patthabi Jois comprises about 46 to 48 postures (asana) depending on how you count it.

But as Pattabhi Jois’ grandson, the current paramguru of the practice, Sharath Jois, points out in his recent book, Ageless: A Yogi’s Secrets to a Long and Healthy Life, “Ten asanas are all you need.”  These are the two Sun Salutations, Utthita Trikonasana A and B, Pachimattanasana, Purvattanasana, Baddha Konasana, Upavistha Konasana, Supta Padangusthasana, Uttitha Hasta Padangusthasana, Utkatasana, Virabhadrasana 1 and 2, Urdhva Dhanurasana, and Padmasana.  (That’s 11 actually).

Consider those Sharath’s essentials.  Do them every day and you’ll increase your chances of a long and healthy life.

I have my own set of essentials, which comprises the Sun Salutations, the first four standing poses; the Virabhadrasana sequence to bring me to the mat, the first four sitting poses, Navasana, Supta Padangusthasana, Urdhva Dhanurasana, Shirshana, and Padmasana.  On mornings I’m not quite up to the full Primary (often a Friday after Thursday night out on two wheels), I do those essentials and generally feel almost human afterwards.  One seems to derive most of the benefit of a full practice in about half the time.

Sometimes bicycling the night before is like that, too.  As long as you tick off all the required boxes—a meandering route, a parking garage with a view, some provisioning, a somewhat stupid path over or alongside some water, and, eventually, a cheery blaze on a spot of land that the ancient First Nations People in area probably hung out at as well—then you’ve essentially done it all, even if that means you’re home before midnight on a late winter evening that might be the last dry one we see for a while.

Those Point83 essentials may not really contribute to a long and healthy life; they do, though, foster what I call really living!

Mistakes

In his brilliant and timeless essay, “Solving for Pattern,” (first published 1981 in The Gift of the Good Land), the farmer poet philosopher Wendell Berry lays out about a dozen criteria of a “good solution,” one that operates organically within the pattern from which it arose.

Berry's desiderata for such a solution include wise counsel such as it being cheap, that it solves more than one problem at a time, that it is good in a variety of respects, including being beautiful, healthful, and fertile, but the one that I’ve always found most compelling is that “good solutions have wide margins, so that the failure of one solution does not imply the impossibility of another.”

In other words, good solutions allow us to screw up a bit and still not fail altogether.  They permit us to make mistakes from which we can recover fairly easily.  Everything doesn’t have to go perfectly for things to work out.  

A good solution tolerates human frailty; it’s based on the recognition that we’re not robots and that, inevitably, we’ll do something stupid, or careless, or just plain dumb, and probably more than once.  If we’re operating with a good solution, though, we’ll be able to somehow muddle through in the end.

The bicycle itself is a prime example of a good solution.  Your bike doesn’t have to run perfectly to get you from one place to another; it can be somewhat out of tune and still work fine.  

It also suffers fools gladly.  

Unlike a car, for instance, which requires vigilance and sobriety to operate safely, the bicycle tolerates a certain amount of blithe intoxication, and, in fact, even celebrates it.

So, you can accidentally wind up in a dead end or descend the wrong alley for no reason other than to climb out of it again and all remains good.  You’ll still eventually find the view you didn’t know you were looking for and get to make even more mistakes all night long.