It was about six weeks ago that my homeslice1 Andy sent me the following text:
I said yes. And that was about 15 sessions ago. Turns out I love yoga, or, as my 10th grade English teacher, the wonderfully weird Mr. Watson, used to say, lurve yoga. The vinyasa hot yoga that seems to be my jam is wicked, wicked difficult to do, in some ways easier than the unbelievably painful cross country and wrestling practices I remember from high school, but in some ways harder. The heat, for one thing: 90 degrees, 75 percent humidity, for an hour, or something like that. The stretching, for an inflexible person like me. The balance. The weird mix of intensity and stillness. With running or wrestling, you know what you have to do: suffer more. With this, you have to both do more and do less.
But after a 9 a.m. session of hot yoga, I feel terrific for the rest of the day. Also, calmer. It’s as if, in draining three gallons of sweat from my body, the yoga drains all my anger. Or just makes me too woozy and incoherent to express any anger. Also, my increased limberness seems to go beyond my muscles and into my … soul? I just feel more flexible, more bendy, less rigid, literally and metaphorically—hence, slower to anger. I think I have been nicer to my children, friends, and coworkers since starting yoga.
This all sounds very woo-woo, at least for me. I am super anti-woo-woo in all its forms. Any talk of “energy” sends me running for the hills, and I once knew I had to break up with a significant other when she seemed to really believe in astrology. Anyone who tries to “manifest” an “intention” makes me want to manifest my fist against the wall.
This prejudice, by the way, has surely not served me well as a religion journalist and scholar. Or rather, it has served me well sometimes, not as well other times. I am much more comfortable than some in calling our spiritual bullshit when it’s used to defraud people of money, or prey on them in other ways; but I know I have written in overly snarky ways about people engaged in behavior that is no less rational, and no more harmful, than a lot of what goes on in Judaism, Catholicism, and other more mainstream traditions.
The yoga teachers at my new joint are pretty light on the New Age stuff. Even so, it wouldn’t be yoga without some of it, and even my favorite teacher asks me to “seal an intention” for each session. And yet … I don’t mind so much.
Am I going soft in middle age?
My wife thinks so, and she is fully prepared to ridicule me for it. “After all those years of making fun of … ,” she rightly chides, here I am, owner of a yoga mat, a terry cloth mat cover, and a monthly pass to the yoga studio. I’ve been reading Neal Pollack’s very funny book Stretch: The Unlikely Making of a Yoga Dude—
—and when he uses terms like shavasana and ujjayi, I know what he’s talking about. And I am only a dozen classes in or so. God help me in six months.
But what made me want to write about this little yoga journey is something that happened today. I finally nailed the wheel pose.
OK, I didn’t nail it the way the woman in the picture is nailing it. But I did a pretty good job of it. And that made me feel particularly good because this was a move we did in wrestling practice back in high school.
Back then, I was a (relatively) limber fourteen-year-old, who didn’t know from back pain or knee surgeries. It wasn’t even close to the hardest thing we had to do in wrestling practice. But it’s a very, very hard thing for 48-year-old me to do. And yoga gave it back to me. In this small way, yoga restored my youth.
I think I am going deeper in; there is a lot more yoga in my future. And thus, I expect, a lot more ribbing from people who have heard me make fun of yoga (really, the culture around yoga; I have no brief against the actual stretching exercises). And in some ways, that might be the most substantial aspect of growth that yoga could give me. As we get older, we can either harden in our prejudices, and double down on our dislikes—politically, culturally, etc.—or we can shrug them off and lighten our load.
Two roads diverge, Cranky Old Man Lane and Old Man With Ponytail and Sandals Road. The second is the path of exploration, with the risk that you become some open-minded your brain falls out. I hope I choose that latter path. Who know where it will lead me? Maybe I’ll fall in love with free jazz. Or museums. Or contra dancing. Or wine.
No, not wine. If I become a wine guy, just shoot me. (Not that it will hurt; my new, yoga-tone body will repel your bullets.)
Hey Yinz Guys!
A couple nights back, I was watching the first episode of the Amazon Primé adaptation of the really fun novel Daisy Jones and the Six—go read it—and within five minutes there was a scene set in 1968 in Pittsburgh, in a working-class home. The voiceover says, “There were two options for the kids in my town. There was the mill, and there was the war”—Vietnam, he means.
This is working-class Pittsburgh, 1968. Which means everyone in the scene should have a Pittsburgh accent. And then I listened on, with annoyance, because I knew what was coming: nobody would have a Pittsburgh accent.
And nobody did.
The movies and TV seldom bother to get it right. The Pittsburghers of This Is Us did not have a Pittsburgh accent (I’m looking at you, Milo Ventimiglia). The characters in The Deerhunter (to my recollection) had no Pittsburgh accents.
I mean, it’s not that hard. Check in at about 2:00 below:
My dad is from Pittsburgh. I hear traces of this accent in some of my relatives (not my dad, for some reason).
By the way, the Philly accent, which some have on my mom’s side, is also relatively absent from movies. Bradley Cooper can do anything, so why couldn’t he do a Philly accent here?
Especially since Cooper can do a Philly accent! He grew up in Metro Philly. See 1:08 here:
If this all interests you, read this fine Slate piece about why nobody even attempts Philly accents, and why actors (including De Niro in Silver Linings) just sub in vague New Yawkese to signify the working class.
Well, enough for tonight. God bless Pittsburgh. They’re going through a lot right now. I wish the actors could get the city right. But then again, you can’t get this city right, not from afar. You have to be there.
Let’s bring this one back, okay?