Shift the Perspective

 I hope you all had a wonderful weekend. The passage of time has been on my mind recently and how quickly time goes. We value our time at such a premium that we seem to spend quite a bit of it worried about wasting it. It is kind of ironic when we step back and realize the time we waste worrying about wasting time. 

I had that experience last week and it became my message to share with students. My son (who is a high school junior) had signed up to attend a college event for a school he is interested in and the event was about an hour drive away. So after school we discussed clothing and appropriate questions and then made the trip. As we pulled into the parking lot my son got an email telling him that the meeting was cancelled due to un foreseen circumstances (a car had driven into the venue– not joking :)). My first reaction was one of frustration that we had “wasted all this time” driving down and now driving back but then I quickly began to shift my perspective. The time was not wasted in the slightest… I was getting two uninterrupted hours in the car with my son. We talked the entire time. This is time that is so rare and precious these days– now that he drives, has a super busy social life and a girlfriend. I went from frustration to gratitude very quickly. It really is true that when we change the way we look at things, the things we are looking at change. 

We practiced this concept on the mat by paying attention to what the poses were accomplishing in our bodies as opposed to how they are supposed to look. For instance when our ankles are wobbly in balancing poses we are actually strengthening the muscles in our ankles. The more we wiggle, the stronger they are getting. When we change our perspective on the pose, the pose changes as well and when we practice with the poses on the mat we can train our brains to see this other perspective both on and off it. 

Time is precious, both how we spend it and how we think about it. Even last night as I headed back to the airport to pick up my daughter because her flight back to school had been cancelled, my brain quickly went to gratitude for an extra night with her even if it meant another trip to the airport the next day. I guess all the practice is working! I wish you all a wonderful practice this week.