From 0 to 100

Jeronimo, a filmmaker and technology entrepreneur, wrote this:

“Everything you’ve learned in school as ‘obvious’ becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There is not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.” –R. Buckminster Fuller

This quote got me thinking about the art of being able to pend. The pendulum, oscillating movement, which brings a midpoint.

Movement, change, adjustment, leads us to encounter. Home.

I discovered a lesson through yoga. I am a newly graduated yoga instructor, and I have an incredible flexible arch. I can do drop backs, back flips, natarajasanas, but among many things that yoga has taught me, one of the most important is getting to know my limitations. So, as I am very flexible with the arch I lack all absolute flexibility in my legs. Most of the times beginners are more flexible than me in their first class. They completely kick my ass. This is very embarrassing for me being the instructor.

So, ideas start to come with explosive immediacy, like an instant burst. My human thoughts start to behave like a monstrous pendulum; I keep swinging from one extreme to the other. If we had a 0 to 100 scale it would look like this: If I stay with the depressed concept that I look like an idiot in front of the new students I am in the 0-30 scale, depressed, incapable, disqualified. But on the other hand, there is another story too, if I stay with the other concept that I can do asanas that many other instructors with whom I graduated with cannot do, I fall in the 70-100 category. And I confess I have felt pride, arrogance, vanity.

This is how I have reached the fifties. Mid-point. Range from 0 to 100. Oscillate in the extremes. That is more my territory. I usually move from 1 and 30 to 70 and 100, this is how I reach to mid-point.

In the end, who am I? The humiliated instructor or the super proud one? I am a combination of both. So, for me to be properly upright, to stand right on top of my axis, is neither to make too much sense of pride with my chest out, nor plunge the chest in too much, with a sense of shame. It is finding a balance between the zeros and the 100’s. That is how I have found my mid-point. The theory of the pendulum to find our balance, our axis. Learning to move to find ourselves.