HALFWAY!

Welcome to Day 15 of my blog series based on Judith Hansen-Lasater’s “A Year of Living Your Yoga.” While the book has 365 quotes, I picked only 30.

I will try to keep these posts to less than 500 words.

Here is the quote:

August 7 — The only people who seem to be done with everything are dead, and we don’t even know about them. Today notice your tendency to want to finish everything and make everything perfect. To experience working with more ease, pick a task and commit to doing it for ten minutes. Then leave it and come back to it during the coming days, but still only for ten minutes at a time. Revel in both how the task gets done and how you don’t need to be done all at once.

Oh! The irony! (I’m typing this at 11:32 the previous evening; I had a huge multi-day buffer of previously written posts and today, my world blew up a little and so here we are. I did get to go for a row though and that was sooooo niiiiiiice.)

So if one reaction is irony, then another reaction of mine is hilarity because I don’t think this Lasater woman has children in her life nor do I think she knows how little I care about finishing projects.

Well, that’s a stretch. But not really, I’ve not tapped at my book in weeks months.

I do know what she means: laundry. Do ten minutes at a time then let it go for three days. Then just do another ten minutes and let it go for three more days. Then do another ten minutes and find a divorce decree at the bottom of the basket. Or dishes.

Or dog walking… that would be rich: leave the house with the dogs and let them go loose after ten minutes and then come back three days later to see if they’re still there. Or if they’ve been picked up by the animal police.

Laundry is a perfect example for how I can “revel in both how the task gets done and how [I] don’t need to be done all at once.” Why? BECAUSE LAUNDRY IS NEVER DONE. It goes on and on, ceaselessly droning like my eighth grade math teacher, Mr. Wallace, at Key Intermediate Middle School.

“MIZZ TUHRNEHR … would you MIIIIIND putting DOWWWWWWN that bath towel and addresssss the problemmmm on the boarrrrrd?”

I will stop making fun of this quote now.

I get what she’s saying. She’s saying to take a break from what you’re doing, say as an air traffic controller, and come back to it a few days later and devote another ten minutes to it and “revel.”

But maybe she’s referring to busy work, like answering emails or returning phone calls (remember those?) or . . . ?

This is the same woman who says to practice yoga every day. Just for 15 minutes. Ok. But … what about the ten minute thing… ?

Oh… It’s me. She says to “pick a task” (any task, just go ahead and pick one… ) and commit to doing it for ten minutes.

Ironing?

Washing the car?

Balancing a bank account?

Painting a bedroom wall?

Writing a blog post? Oh… now we’re talking.

Thank you.