Prepare for the Best, the Worst and the Unexpected: a reminder that things will always 'just' happen
Last month I added a new class to my weekly teaching schedule at the yoga studio. I took it on so excited to finally get a 90 minute long practice class there. Something that wasn’t aligning for the last year or more until now. The studio is a cool 20ish minutes from where I live. Less without traffic. But being a 9am class on a Monday morning, I anticipated a traffic situation that would change the commute time.
In February when my partner and I moved into our new home, my commute time to all of the places I teach shifted quite a bit. One of the most dramatic shifts was for my earliest class in the middle of the week. While talking to my partner about potential traffic issues in the earlier morning, my partner told me about this cool feature on Google Maps where you can plug in the time and day that you’re looking to travel and it will give you it’s best projection of commute time and traffic average. And it even gives you the opportunity to set an alert on the app so you can be reminded of when to leave so you can get to your destination at your ideal arrival time.
The future!
This app and this feature gave me a whole new perspective of life and preparedness potential. I don’t use it very often but when things come up where I’m really unsure or have a pretty brand new route to take and punctuality being sought, it’s super handy.
Now back to this new class I added.
In being aware of rush hour traffic both on highways and streets going from where I live through to where the studio is, I wanted to be sure to leave the house at the right time to get to the studio with no less than 15 minutes before class so that I had time to settle in and get in some before-class-time in the studio. So of course, I decided to use this app to optimize!
The alert was set the day before so that I could be at the studio by 8:45am. The GPS traffic map and route all seemed to match the projection from the night before and it looked like I’d be at the yoga studio on time!
Until I got on the road and hit 2 bouts of local road work that clogged up one street that was only 2 lanes and the other which was only 1 lane for about 2 miles. Traffic added to the regular morning street clogging.
There was absolutely no way to plan for this. It just was what happened this morning. Light anxiety came up while sitting parked behind cars for minutes at a time. Not the worst traffic ever, but traffic getting me closer to being late for my own class.
Luckily, even with the traffic, I made it to the studio at just about 9am on the dot. An honest 3 minutes after. I walked into the studio and found a room full of wonderful, patient and excited students instead of frustrated ones (which I would have understood). And I had a really inspired theme with too perfect of a story to connect to it in class this week studying the First Principle of Anusara Yoga:
Set the Foundation and Open To Grace
Set The Foundation
Which I like to think of and use in my own life as first principle for everything.
As I write out this short story connecting to the theme this week and talk about in class, I laugh because I’m not the most intense preparer. Going with the flow and over time, simply being more conscious of things has been more my way of doing things. Over the years though and through learning this idea most deeply through the Anusara practice, I’ve realized and found that there is a version of what our best and highest efforts are, a way of looking at how we set ourselves up as we move through our different intentions and goals. And being more conscious and active in how we continuously work toward things, no matter how big or small those things are, essentially become the clearest pathways to success.
Success, I’ve found, has become a word and idea that can often put a gap between our efforts to prepare for things and the actual outcome itself. A gap that can get filled with anxiety, stress, disappointment, anger, a sense of failure. Maybe you have your own feelings from experiences you’ve had that could fill in that blank space. And none of those things are wrong things to feel or things that wouldn’t be understandable when things don’t actually go according to plan. Especially when we have done everything we can to get ourselves ready for whatever it is we were setting ourselves up to do, have, or experience.
Open To Grace
So what attitude or philosophy are we connecting to when things don’t go according to plan? When the GPS tells you that everything is perfect for you to get that ideal arrival time but one- NO- two! lane closures and 20 more minutes added to the commute later you end up parking when the class is supposed to start and walking into your job after everyone there for your service. Or when you show up later than that? When the exam doesn’t go according to the amount of time you put in studying. When you don’t land the job you prepped hard for all the interviews and resume revamps for. I could go on.
We can be excellent preppers, but something I like to ask when it comes to this is:
how much of this preparation is to lead me to the highest outcome?
or
how much of this preparation is to control the outcome?
We can’t control everything. I really believe that we all know that even if we don’t all live by that. And I really believe that even if some of us know that, we can tend to forget that life does not move in a line and definitely not based on our plans alone. There’s more at work than our sole mind, body and heart. There is always something bigger than ourselves that can really throw us for a loop in either a really incredible way or in a way that makes us feel unlucky. Either all of our work led us to what we planned, to something even better, or it really didn’t work out the way we planned.
Our capacity to be open to everything that is beyond our individual plan becomes the other pathway toward higher perspective. Giving us the power to reduce the negative energies, ideas and feelings that flood the gap as things slowly begin to turn a different direction then planned and find ourselves more at ease and light-hearted about the twists and turns life takes despite our best preparation.
The First Principle of the practice reminds us that our first and highest priority is the fundamental element that will support the highest potential or the highest outcome- no matter the outcome. But in truly connecting to that, we don’t just connect to what we are doing and plan to do, we also make just as much space for what else there may be and for what is beyond us. Things that could interject and interfere in both ways that we find agreeable and not. And in connecting to both first, everything else is truly being created and manifested with as much of what we can offer as possible while honoring the uncontrollable rest of the Universe.
Whatever happens happens. And as an incredible wise human being once said as we made our way to the airport for a flight he was pretty sure he was going to miss and couldn’t do anything about:
“That’s just what happened”
Because things just happen. There will always be an element of chance, luck and happenstance. No matter how much effort we put into preparing for the best and the worst. And we can use our energy to prepare as best as we can and that will always be perfectly, good enough and even that will continue to evolve and refine as we grow. We can boost our productivity and efficiency and creativity and output. We just may not always end up landing exactly where we thought we would. And the hope is that in practicing embodying our own preparedness and our own openness and cultivating a way of moving from pose to pose using those two tools at the same time- we find a freedom and a joy in all the different ways in which we do things both on and off the mat. We bridge the gap between preparation and outcome with a smile and a calm knowing that it might turn out differently. Who knows? And when it does we’re able to say, “I guess that’s just what happened”. Smile. And move on to the next thing without any extra weight being dragged from the last.
Ultimately, what I continue to learn from the yoga practice is that we can prepare for life as much as we want and with all the effort we have but in the end, the rest is up to the Universe. The continuously hard truth that we can’t control it all is also a freeing agent. We can’t control it all! It’s not all on us. And our best is and will always be perfectly good enough. It feels good to be able to do and it can feel just as good to allow things to happen.
May we be open, trusting and full of faith in both our efforts and in the mysterious ways in which the Universe works.