Last week I had “one of those days.” You know the kind,
where everything is going wrong and everyone is on your last nerve. Work was
stressful, my kids were fighting, even my cats were fighting. Before I blew a
gasket, I packed the kids in the car and headed off for yoga, breathing in and
out, counting to ten.
I ran in and laid my yoga mat down, then rushed my warring
boys off to kid-care in the gym. I returned just in time to see one
of my fellow yogis literally pick my yoga mat up and toss it to the side, as
she preceded to take my space.
WTF?
Breathing… I asked another woman who saw this if she would
mind moving up about 6 inches so I could have someplace to put my mat. She said
no. She needed all of the space she was occupying and all the space surrounding
it.
Thus began my inner rant – dividing myself from “those
people” – the ones who don’t get what yoga is all about. “Those people” I
assured myself, “are ruining my experience, and my whole Saturday!”
I wanted to see myself as separate from these defensive,
space-grubbing narcissists. But then I remembered that we are connnected…
Joni Mitchell sang it 40 years ago, “We are stardust…we are
golden…”
This is not just some hippie-dippie statement full of
moonbeams. There is actually some real science behind it.
Astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson explains it this way:
“The atoms of our bodies are traceable to stars that manufactured
them in their cores and exploded these enriched ingredients across our galaxy, billions
of years ago. For this reason, we are biologically connected to every other living
thing in the world. We are chemically connected to all molecules on Earth. And we
are atomically connected to all atoms in the universe. We are not figuratively,
but literally, stardust.”
In other words, I am connected to every person in this
Universe, even the ones I don’t like. They way that I respond to others will
affect me just as much (if not more) than it affects them.
So I breathed, and calmed myself and found another space to
occupy.
People may have horrible manners and display sefishness, but
we are connected. They are, we are, I am connected to everything in the
universe, and made of the very same matter. Whether I like it or not.
And just when I want to struggle against the fact that this
is true, here’s something else Tyson says, “The good thing about science is that
it's true whether or not you believe in it. ”
