My Year of Hopefulness - The Power of Silence

"Let us love, since our heart is made for nothing else." ~ St. Therese

I have completely lost my voice to this cold I have been fighting. I can barely eek out an audible whisper. This is especially hilarious because talking is one of my favorite activities. Truly, I've been known to have a very interesting conversation with a brick wall. I talk to myself in my apartment, as I'm working through problems. I have lots and lots of opinions on just about everything. And now I have been silenced.

I was in DC this weekend with a load of my business school friends for our friends' Chris and Steph's wedding. I don't know that I've ever seen a groom that happy. Seriously, if Chris's smile was any wider his face would have cracked. It was wonderful to see someone I love so much so happy.

After the wedding and reception, my voice was really getting hoarse. The trouble with this sore throat is that it is not currently accompanied by any other symptoms. I feel fine; I just sound a little funny. Actually, I sound a lot funny. To get the blood flowing in my throat, I went to a yoga class with my friend, Julie, at 9am. I always learn so much going to a yoga class. I watch for teaching technique and I invariably learn a new pose or a new way of thinking about a pose that allows me to deepen my practice and teaching.

In Savasana, corpse pose, I was completely relaxed, or so I thought. Savasana is done at the end of virtually every yoga practice. It allows our bodies and minds to approach a meditative state after being worked through the preceding asanas. People have become so relaxed in Savasana that they've been known to fall into a sleep / dream state.

The teacher came around to each of us, pressing our shoulders firmly to the mat and down away from our ears. Until she did this, I didn't realize that I was holding any tension there at all. In fact, I was scrunching up my heart a bit. With the teacher's pressure, my heart opened with a little bit of a creak and a crack. I felt lighter. I felt a bit more love.

It is an amazing thing about silence and time with friends and yoga and the witnessing of an act of love and commitment. In the past few months, I have been shown how risky and wonderful loving with an open heart can be. I looked around at the wedding reception: at Chris and Steph, of course, and also at my friends Daphne and Eric, and Courtney and Brian, also newly married this year. Their lives are richer for having one another. There is this unspoken chemistry that just works with all of them. At some point, they must have all been a little bit scared, too, maybe afraid to keep their hearts open. Somehow, they worked through that fear and emerged happy and healthy and whole to find another person happy and healthy and whole with an open heart ready to love them.

Today I felt more certain than ever that eventually I'd find the guy for me. That creaking and cracking of my heart was symbolic of that openness I've been able to find in the second half of this year. In the midst of my forced silence and voluntary yoga practice, my heart and my mind came together, my mind accepting that this heart o' mine after being put through the fire many times is now shined and polished and poised for the kind of love and commitment that so many of my friends have generously shown can work.

The image above is not my own. It can be found here.

My Year of Hopefulness - It's what's missing that counts

Today I started reading In Pursuit of Elegance by Matthew May. May's premise in the book is that what's not there - in a product, a service, a piece of art, a book - often trumps what is. 12 pages in and I am completely hooked. It's about what we choose not to do that shapes as our lives as much as what's on our to-do list. It's about editing, making decisions, and taking away the unnecessary so that the necessary can shine.

May quotes a lot of sources, referencing everything from ancient Chinese proverbs to pop culture. It never feels contrived, forced, or overly ambitious. He is making connections between seemingly disparate ideas, and teaching us how to live a more valuable, satisfying life in the process.

Early on, May quotes Jim Collins's now infamous essay that he wrote for USA Today on the subject of "stop-doing." Collins says, "A great piece of art is composed not just of what is in the final piece, but equally what is not. It is the discipline to discard what does not fit - to cut out what might have already cost days or even years of effort - that distinguishes the truly exceptional artist and marks the ideal piece of work, be it a symphony, a novel, a painting, a company, or most important of all, a life."

It's these last two words that got me. I understand editing a novel, a piece of music, a company. We spend a lot of time, maybe most of our time, stuffing our lives full of experience, people, places, and things. We do more and more and more to the point that we can't remember what we did 10 minutes ago. So what if we did and said less and less and less. What would our lives look like then? What if we only put the precious time we have with one another toward things that passionately, ardently interest us? How would we be different, and how would the world around us be different? Could we actually have a greater positive impact by focusing on the precious few things that really matter to us rather than the mediocre many?

Jazz great John McLaughlin said, "All the music that was ever heard came from the inner silence in every musician." I extend that quote to say that every human accomplishment has come to be because someone took something from their inner being, from their own personal silence, and gave it to the world. It's really the only work we ever have to do: strip away the fascades, the excess, what we can live without so that we can know and nurture the handful of things that really count.