courtyard thoughts

I’m sitting in the courtyard of a local café, making the most of the morning quiet after an early fitness class. In theory, I could be sitting in my courtyard at home. It’s finally warm enough to sit outside first thing. Except that I wouldn’t be able to arrive at the inner quiet and wonder that I find at this wobbly wooden table, as the café fills up inside and, blissfully, no-one wanders outside to share my public space. A pot of green tea, brought with a smile on a tray, also helps.

As morning sounds pick up around me, my conscientiousness switches off, as if knowing it isn’t needed, much like sending my phone to sleep. In this courtyard, I don’t have to take my dog for a walk, plan my next yoga class, or rescue the washing that crazy winds will have blown about the garden. Nor do I have to message friends to cancel a drinks party which happens to fall on the same day as a skin cancer treatment that my daughter advised I describe to them, euphemistically, as a minor medical procedure. Instead, I can push my to-do list aside and be myself at a table, and let my thoughts wander.

Yesterday I taught four yoga classes, one more than usual on a Wednesday. Yet no-one, bar another writer, would guess that moving words and paragraphs about on a page, including the ones you’re now reading, is more demanding than anything that I do on a mat. The teaching I do is, nonetheless, work. To be the object of a collective gaze, and, that much-overused term, to hold space for others, neither of these come naturally to me. Every class I teach pushes me to the edge of what I can do. It’s just how teaching yoga is for me.

These days it’s become normal for women to work full-time throughout their career. I’m conscious of this because, currently, I teach yoga to a number of women who have done exactly this and are around my age. As their careers have progressed, and as they’ve gained in power and earning capacity, they’ve led lives that I sometimes catch myself thinking I too might have lived (overseas holidays, beauty appointments, and a wardrobe allowance) had I completed the Law degree I was once enrolled in, rather than heading overseas in search of the meaning of life (a search I’m still on), in the process of which I fell in love with a man also in search of it.

Sitting at my wobbly table, I catch myself and smile, knowing that this is a story I’m telling myself that suits my own ends, unconsciously designed so that I come out on top. I can, of course, massage my past as much as I like. And yet change nothing.

I always thought that living overseas for 18 years, in cloudy London, would save me from the risk of skin cancer. Until this last Tuesday wjem a skin doctor put a big light on my hairline and said that the spot I’d been avoiding having checked was indeed a skin cancer (though, he added, sounding confident, not a scary one). At that moment, I saw myself in profile on the monitor, a middle-aged woman looking worried.

On Wednesday, as I went about my life, I had the thought that even if my skin cancer was the scary kind, I wouldn’t need to change my life in a bucket-list, last chance way. Because I liked the life that I was living, just as it was. I liked my work, even if it would never lead to wealth and power. Besides, I knew how fortunate I was not to have spent my life in office suites, wearing pantyhose and measuring my time with clients in billable increments.

That same Wednesday, the day I taught four classes, I sat with my laptop open and a pot of tea by my side on the wooden deck of a hotel that overlooks the water and city, a reward to myself for teaching an extra class. As I played with sentences on the screen, I couldn’t help but catch drifts of conversation from a group at the table next to me. The other tables on the deck were occupied, so there was nothing for it but to stay put and hope that the noisy threesome drinking bubbly might leave. Half an hour went by before I twigged that the three lawyers on to their second drinks were celebrating their win in a hugely polarised debate over a proposed football stadium that will result in 42k people leaving the stadium after each match, thousands of whom would swarm past the deck we were sitting on in their exit from a mushroom-shaped stadium that promised to blow the state’s current $5b debt out by an estimated $1.3b, and further dent its already lowered credit rating.

As I gazed over the top of my screen, at billowing yachts on the river, my first thought was that the three lawyers were around my age. My second thought was that democracy was broken when powerful professionals took the upper hand and played bread and circuses with ‘the people’. My last thought was more peaceable. I felt genuine relief that I had work that I found engaging and that didn’t cause me to litter every phrase with the f-word. And while I wasn’t, like these lawyers, in line to retire with a big super, with luck I might never have to retire from the things that give my life meaning.