Going with the flow

Living in a new neighborhood--and having only one car--means finding new pretty-much-everything. A lot of our favorite shops and service providers from before our Texas detour are still in business (like our beloved dentist and our butcher and the Russian tailor who altered a vintage tuxedo so perfectly it looks like it was custom-made for my husband, not some Norwegian guy in Seattle in 1959), but the day-to-day stuff? We need to find new places to get all that.  New grocery store, new dry cleaner, new bike repair shop, new vet where we can get flea medicine and our strangely-hard-to-procure cat food* and for me, a new yoga studio and LYS.

Having found those last two already, I've discerned a distinct uptick in my productivity.



I got my office mostly set up, at last, and can now sit and knit and work on the computer in there--you know, have an actual WORK day when I'm at home. And out of nowhere (or "now here," perhaps? That feeling of finally being settled?), I had the wherewithal to churn out a new project that I've been kicking around in my head for ages. Freed by daily yoga classes, and fueled with that messload of found angora from down the street, a little stuffed polar bear materialized over the course of a single morning. I sketched out the basic concept many months ago, but thought it was going to stay on the back burner for a lot longer than this! I do, after all, have a ton of work I'm supposed to be doing. Finalizing several other knitting projects I embarked on earlier this year are actually not even the first on that list. So why start a new one?

Well, the new yoga studio plays a part in that, too, I think. In trying to get the most out of the summer unlimited plan I signed up for (kind of forgetting that I would be out of town for over half of July, with two conferences and my grandparents' 75th wedding anniversary to attend), and trying out all the teachers to find my new favorite one, I've been practicing nearly every day. And gee, wow, surprise surprise: I actually FEEL better physically, find it easier to focus, and tackle projects big and small with much greater ease when I'm doing that. I'm also much more receptive to the idea that some days you can do a thing--stand on one foot with your arms in the air, do a backbend without clonking yourself on the head--and some days you can't, and you just do what you can on any given day.

It's a lesson I keep on learning and re-learning in yoga, as well as in my research and writing and knitting: Go with the flow. Hit a wall? Go around it. If there's a finish line way ahead of you, chances are you can run downhill to it tomorrow, instead of struggling uphill today. (And if you must struggle uphill, better to do it in short bursts than Sisyphian marathons, where you end up with the perception that all attempts at the thing are doomed to be unproductive.) Sometimes you just need to do what's coming EASILY. Look how cute it can be when you do!




And what could be a better reminder to go with the floe (tee-hee) than a polar bear? Pattern coming soon; check here or on my Ravelry page for updates on that...



*I do not know why it has to take three phone calls, a faxed authorization from our former vet, and a 15-minute drive to buy a bag of melonfarming kibble, but it does. There must be something really good in this cat food. Maybe I should try smoking it. We live in California, I bet smoking cat food is legal here...