What's Worth Doing and When
On age and the limits of limits
CW: mild language
This week was a weird confluence of age-related awarenesses. I don’t pay a ton of attention to age these days, certainly not like I did when I was in my early 20’s (an age there is NO amount of money someone could offer me to relive), but everything this week conspired to be about that.
My kids reminded me of a conversation we had a few weeks ago about Kid President (who is now 21) and asked me if he could run for actual president, so we talked about constitutional age limitations. One of my group chats talked about kids taunting teachers about dying their roots, and how one of my kids called me old and when I asked them what they meant by that, they said, “23.” Another child was shocked by the fact that I’m the same age as their mom. I am also mildly shocked by this, though I have a slightly stronger grasp of how math and aging work together.
The thing, though, that most resonated around age was a yoga class. I’m a reticent vinyasa practitioner; I can do most of what an up-tempo, one-breath-per-movement class offers, but I often do not want to. I choose Saturday classes based primarily on schedule, and yesterday, it made more sense to be out of the house during the vinyasa class. One of the reason I’m not always ready for a vinyasa class is that they’re often packed. I don’t mind a busy class (there’s an energy that can be useful and fun), but sometimes, I don’t have the energy for that many people in my grounding practice. Yesterday, though, it was lightly attended, and my teacher included more challenging poses.
Headstand is one of those poses that I joke about when I talk about my yoga teaching, i.e. “it’ll be pretty gentle, no headstand, I promise.” I couldn’t BEGIN to teach headstand right now, if I wanted to. I can’t really begin to DO headstand right now, even when I do want to, which waxes and wanes. I’m so rarely in classes where this is cued (because I’m in spaces of practice that really want to prioritize safety and accessibility, not because headstand is a bad pose or because my teachers don’t know how to teach it) that I push it to the side or willfully forget that this is an option, an edge that I could be working toward.
I’ve been caught in a spectrum of feelings about yoga for at least the past two years. When work has been at its most intense, I need the less physically intense practices (yin, gentle hatha, maybe a slow flow class here and there) because I simply cannot invite any more intensity. And then there are the days, in a phase of this, that I can’t get out of my head during a gentle class, or I have to attend a vinyasa class because someone’s redoing part of my kitchen and I need to be away from the sound of the tile saw. And I remember how valuable it can be to have a class kick my ass to the point that I can’t actually think about anything else for an hour, to figure my way through a physical and mental challenge that doesn’t look anything like the day-to-day workday challenges.
And it’s these two extremes that I don’t know what to do with: I don’t know if I care about being able to do arm balances (crow, which I’ve talked about before, being the most common, probably) and inversions (headstand, handstand, etc.). Some days, I do, and on those days, I can’t tell if that comes from a genuine curiosity about what my body can do and what the pose can do for it, or if it comes from some kind of icky competitive frustration that other people can do these poses and I can’t. Some days, I think it’s completely unnecessary, and on those days, I wonder if I’m just making excuses because I don’t want to do the core strengthening work that these poses require.
The age range in the vinyasa classes I take is interesting. I’m usually on the younger end, and it’s not uncommon for me to be the youngest. This used to make me feel weird, but as I’ve gone to class longer, the people I go to class with have become less their age and more just the people I go to class with. That’s not to say that I don’t value their life experience, quite the contrary. I’ve always been drawn to people older than I am, whether that was high school seniors when I was in middle school or people in their mid-thirties when I was in the dreaded early twenties or people who are in or nearing their 50’s now. The people who are in their 60’s and still teaching and still learning in the classroom leave me straight-up awestruck. One of my favorite things that happened on the launch of my master’s degree program this week was being in a breakout room with three people who were all 20+ year teaching veterans; I felt like I was both home and reverently sitting at the feet of the heroes.
So being in a multigenerational space isn’t new for me, though something shifts when physicality is involved. Because in this class yesterday, when my teacher cued headstand prep, after rolling my eyes and kind of assuming everyone else would too, I was humbled to see two women at least a decade and a half older than I am slowly, methodically, nestle their heads in their interlaced fingers and kick their legs up into a full headstand, like it was something, but not TOO much of something to them.
I do spend more time than I’d like to admit thinking that I “wasted” the prime physical ability of my twenties, keeping a weird theatre schedule and eating bar food and never exercising. When I was theoretically at the height of what I could do physically, I didn’t use ANY of it. It wasn’t until I was in my 30’s that I started to value what my body could do and take any kind of systematic action to care for it. And I have seen huge, if incremental, changes in what I can do, and, more importantly, how I feel (physically, mentally, all the ways). There are still occasional pangs of “what if I’d done this when I was 20?”
But, yesterday, for the first time, I didn’t feel the wash of jealousy or panic or comparison or grief, but a simple possibility of hope and the promise of the unknown. Watching these women in their 60’s confidently come into a pose that’s always terrified me felt like an invitation, a reminder that it’s not too late to try a new thing, and not too late to hone skills that are here, to push them further, if and when that seems useful.
I still have mixed feelings about how curious I am about these poses, and I’m past believing that I have to be able to do them to be a good teacher in the style I teach. When I asked two of my yoga teachers about the push-and-pull of wanting to explore the edges versus being okay with teaching what’s been the most supportive for me, they responded with a simultaneous shrug, the subtext of which was, “honey, that’s a thing you’re gonna have to figure out for yourself.” Which of course I already knew. And deeply wished wasn’t true. What one of them did say, though, that I’ve held onto was about teaching yoga, and teaching generally, and maybe a little bit about life generally: “We are all new at teaching when we start. We are all young at teaching, no matter how old we are in years. That’s why the practice is all there is.”
That’s why the practice is all there is.
I’d love to hear what you’re currently practicing and how what age-related nuances you might be considering this week.
I liked this article (paywalled, sorry) about how old you feel. I don’t have an answer to this question for myself, exactly, because I feel as though I maybe haven’t found my subjective age yet. But the concept is interesting!
This week was also my 10Q week, which means this website sends me my answers to questions from this time last year, then requires that I think about them for a few days, before I can answer the same questions this year. Since I’m still thinking, I haven’t decided what to share or not yet, but I highly recommend giving this community art project a shot!
There’s still time to write Vote Forward letters in advance of November’s elections!
New October calendar here! Hope to see you at these Gentle Hatha classes! Please note the shift in time on the 20th. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out.
