A Crook In the Path...

In my yoga class this week, my wonderful teacher Lisa told us that balance is a necessary and worthwhile pursuit, but it is often unsustainable. What is balanced in one moment may be out of balance in the next. Our lives are simply an exercise in trying to achieve equilibrium though we all know that once it’s achieved, the wind will blow, the rules will change and adjustments will need to be made once again.

She used the Sanskrit word "vakrokti" which essentially means crooked. Though we, in modern life, have all kinds of associations with the word crooked (think crook, a crooked businessman, and of course, crooked teeth…) Lisa mentioned that it’s in the state of vakrokti, or crookedness where our lives are lived. That if we weren’t crooked, we would not be able to strive for balance, and that is where the living takes place—the struggle for equanimity. The running to stand still.

I am looking at the kind of life that I’ve been living since my teeth have started on their journey to un-vakrokti themselves. I have been quieter, more introspective. I went to Mexico. I have begun courting myself. I have simply given myself a different sort of life than I had before. This is neither good nor bad, but it’s my way of balancing on the tightrope as I take on this challenge.

It seems appropriate then, that I am reading Let The Great World Spin, which takes place in NYC circa 1974, when Philippe Petit strung his wire across the Twin Towers and took a 45 minute hop, skip, jump across it. It weaves the stories of many characters to that one event, and I haven’t enjoyed a book this much since The History of Love by Nicole Krauss, which is my all-time favorite.

The book viscerally takes me back to my childhood, when New York was a very dirty, very angry, very dangerous place. I haven’t felt those feelings of dread and the scared retraction of my heart in a long time. I am both impressed and disturbed at how tangibly this book brings back those feelings and I am wondering if the book gives that same experience to those who didn’t grow up here. I find myself getting caught up, the way I would when I was young, at how charged and reactive everything was, how vigilant I had to be all the time to protect myself. Giuliani had his issues as Mayor, but man, it’s palpably different from how I felt as a child. The safety, security and a relative calmness moved slowly into our everyday lives, and I cannot remember now, how we lived without it.

My city experienced severe vakrokti and straightened itself into something much more humane, mature, even graceful. Certainly my teeth can do the same.