Conversation Starters

This morning I was listening to an episode of   You Made It Weird with Pete Holmes  where Pete recounted a recent conversation he'd had with someone about memory.  To be specific, he was talking about memories his daughter, who's maybe preschool/kindergarten-aged, was forming.  Pete's friend said something to the effect of his daughter only really remembering big things, like a family vacation, and not the everyday things like her dad coming to pick her up from school.  Pete guffawed like this person was missing the entire point of life, doubling down that he was certain his daughter would   only  remember things like him coming to pick her up from school.    That  was the core memory, not a random vacation. It made me chuckle as I went about the business of doing a very mundane task -- changing the sheets on my bed -- as I thought about how much Pete  wanted  to be right about this.  That his daughter would be so evolved ...

 "When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.  When the student is really ready, the teacher will disappear." - Tao Te Ching For over 11 years, I had an almost daily yoga practice. It started in February 2008 when a housemate and dear friend of mine all but forced me to join her for a class.  She'd selected the studio and told me what time to be ready and because I'm a good wingman, I went along with it -- just for her.  I am  certain  I told the desk staff that I would never return. Famous last words. Not only did I return a week later, I returned the week after that and the week after that until I found a teacher or two I really enjoyed and the next thing you know, I was hooked. Before long, I was enrolled in a monthly membership and prioritizing time on my mat over afterwork drinks. Sometimes I'd compromise and go to class  and then  show up to drinks, normalizing the "wear your yoga gear in public" long before it became the now-standar...

I want to share a moment of my life from yesterday afternoon.  I was out walking through Lakeview Cemetery (per usual) when I noticed an old man with a long white beard and an orange bandana tied around his head puttering by me very slowly on a found-it-in-the- way -back-of-the-garage motorcycle.  He was wearing jeans and a t-shirt, making him stand out as a possible ex-Hell's Angel, someone who valued life on the road and nonconformity in a way someone from the 60's or 70's would.  If he'd been listening to music, it would have absolutely been The Grateful Dead or CCR or the Rolling Stones.  But all that I heard as he motored past me was the strain of his motorcycle to stay upright at the slow speed he was traveling.  I watched him putter up the hill by the Haserot Angel and disappear around the bend where he was temporarily erased from my mind.  After all, I see colorful characters in the cemetery all the time -- there was no real reason for him to stand ...

  October 2016 was an exciting time to be a Cleveland Indians fan.  For the first time in nearly two decades (the last time being 1997), the team blazed its way through the postseason bracket to the World Series.  At the time, I was running a yoga and wellness center near Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts -- right in the heart of Red Sox Nation -- but in the fourteen years I’d lived in Boston, I’d never stifled my loyalty to my hometown team.  That October, I proudly wore my Cleveland Indians gear to work every day. That came with its challenges. It wasn’t the razzing for cheering for a team other than the Red Sox -- it was because of the logo brandished on many of my hoodies and t-shirts: Chief Wahoo, the red-faced cartoon drawing of a Native American, the symbol of Cleveland baseball since the 1940’s.  There I was, striding through the studio, glowing from my team’s big win the night before, only to have students walk right up to me and say, “How can ...