July’s Things

On Throwing Routines to the Wind

Some snapshots of this month. San Diego, CA; San Antonio, TX; Buffalo, NY. July 2024.

I spent 12 nights somewhere other than my house during July, including a trip to visit friends and watch my husband’s triathlon, a trip to San Diego tagging along to a conference I wasn’t actually attending, and a 3-day conference trip during which I think I slept a total of 13 hours.  I knew when I started to calendar out my July that it was going to be a whirlwind. A joyful whirlwind, but the whirliest of winds. In fact, I spent most of June worrying about that. It felt hard to let in the idea of as much good as I had planned when it meant how many plans I had planned. And also how few days I had to steady myself with a routine at home in between plans. 

Enter my lifelong engagement (struggle? tussle? the dreaded journey?) with the yamas aparigraha and bramacharya. All of the yamas and niyamas are big enough concepts to spend a lifetime on, but these two are the ones that feel simultaneously most applicable for me and furthest from my natural inclination (because of course). 

Aparigraha translates loosely to non-possessiveness, non-grasping, non-greed. For me, practicing this concept relates more to a loosening of the grip on expectations - for myself, for other people, for my dog, for what’s possible on individual calendar days, for giant systems (though certainly, I could also use to rely a little bit less on my own capitalistic tendencies). Brahmacharya can relate to a variety of things, but the translation that resonates most with me is approximately “right use of energy,” or the idea of applying your energy to things that matter, which, again, for me, often means letting go of using energy on things that don’t matter or don’t matter enough or won’t be changed by me worrying about it.

I was a hot mess express the night before leaving for my conference. I felt like my lack of discipline and routine had left me totally unprepared for my role there, I was freaked out about how to manage conversation in my carpool scenario, and I could not decide what clothes to pack to save my life (my eventual answer, always and forever, for better or for worse: all of them). I was grasping at sets of expectations - for me, for my colleagues, for conferences, for the carrying capacity of reusable bags - that were unrealistic and unhelpful. And WOW was I using a lot of energy to do that.

When we finally got en route, though, something shifted. There was nothing to do but go. There was no way forward but one task at a time - respond honestly in the car conversation, check into the hotel, set up the group chat. The conference was not perfect - there were issues with technology and session pacing and my own facilitation and good old fashioned systemic nonsense. But none of that could be overshadowed by consciously deciding, one conversation topic at a time, to absolutely NOT go to bed at a reasonable hour (letting go of expectations of what I should do - aparigraha). Or by the electricity of planning with people whose internal pace can match mine, and who can exquisitely parry my rapid-fire, circular verbal brainstorming, but who have collectively so much more experience teaching than I do that I was having to actively learn in the moment just to keep up (and not using any energy to freak out about feeling behind - brahmacharya). None of that is possible in the necessarily rigid routine of my daily world at home or at work during the school year (nor could I likely sustain that pace of supercharged growth for much more than three days). It took me three additional days to recover when I got home, leading to another kind of routine-less meandering half a week, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Similar themes emerged from my other trips - my favorite times in New York included a lazy, dog-filled morning watching a triathlon (not the one my husband was in, a different one - who am I?), and San Diego was best experienced on a terrible-quality rental bike without a working GPS signal and in a kayak on a very choppy bay. There was a lot of time meandering with people, too, who I don’t get to see often, or not outside of very specific contexts. I didn’t have plans for any of these activities or conversations; there was no routine to follow. They just were, and I was present enough, for five minutes here and there, to let them be. That’s not to say I’m not looking forward to and consciously thinking about how my daily routines can support all I hope to accomplish at work and beyond this fall, but it does mean that, for a moment, there was value in throwing it all out the window and letting the fresh air in. 

So this email wasn’t ready until several days into August. And I don’t have a list of things from July because there is no through-line of things I’ve done any more than once in that last beautifully bananas month. I hope your summer has offered you some space to loosen the grip and settle your energy in whatever way works best for you, or that those opportunities are forthcoming, because summer does not hold a monopoly on routine-breaking breaths of fresh air.

I’d love to know what routines you’re loving or hating or wishing to be free from.

Hope to see you for practices this August! You can click the calendar image to register for the classes, or the workshop image below to register for my very first in-person workshop at Studio Satya in Austin!