Notice the moon.

What might happen?
If the shelving for the new bathrooms isn't built on time?

If the art isn't all hung?
If there is not enough cheese at the party?
If I don't have time to make the brownies?
If the ballet bar doesn't get rehung?
If I don't have time to set up the desk?
If my cold gets worse and worse and worse and I lose my voice and I can't teach on our first day open?

These are all thoughts that interrupted me as I mediated this morning at 5:00am. I can't sleep. I can't fall asleep and I can't stay asleep. At times like this I remind myself to be grateful for those nights where I can go into that deep warm tunnel of slumber. I'll get back there soon I hope, but right now that place is very, very elusive.

My thoughts, the plague of perfection, are the reason Yoga is so important to me. For me, Yoga is like a squeegee that wipes away all of the writing on a wipe board at the end (or the beginning) of the day. Mental floss, many people call it.

What I miss when my brain, my life, become so encumbered with these thoughts, is the wholeness of life. Like yesterday morning when I was hanging the mirrors at the studio and my friend Kate called to ask if I thought a Halloween game of Capture the Flag in a cemetery was weird. I was too crazed to answer the call, but when I listened to her message later, I thought how fun it would have been to talk about that idea with her.

Or last night at 7:00pm when I was scrubbing the men's dressing room floors and Nancy called to remind me to look at the blood moon. I raced through my cleaning to go outside. I drove like a maniac home to get to a place where I could see it. By the time I finally got to enjoy the majesty of the moon we only see once every 18 years, I was agitated and exhausted. Seeing the moon was like one more thing to check off my list.

So what would happen if I didn't get any of that stuff done? I would disappoint people. I would disappoint myself. I would feel angry at the contractor who I adore for failing me. I would fear the anger from my students for not having my shit together. But the world would go on. No one would miss the brownies or the cheese.

It goes back to the lesson I try to teach daily in Yoga. "Do your best." If I shake things up and talk to myself like I would talk to my 10-year old daughter, I would be so much more compassionate, loving, forgiving.  "Lucia," I would say, "did you try your best?" I would reach out my arms and pull her towards me and sit her long legs sideways across mine and let her put her head on my shoulder. "Yes," she'd say. And we'd sit like that for a while, letting that idea sink in.

You can't always get what you want

There was a period growing up when The Rolling Stones was always playing on our stereo. In dealing with her three rivalrous daughters, Mom had a fairly regular mantra, "You can't always get what you want."

There are probably three times each day when I have to tell my daughter that she can't have something that she really wants (like dessert, or skipping hair washing or a sleepover with Cece on a school night.) No matter how big or small the disappointment, Lucia's frown face is always dinosaur-sized. But her recovery is usually speedy. After a whine, a cry, a kick, she's over it. Usually.

Last week when Lucia really wanted to take a night walk, I blew her off, telling her it had gotten too late. Her disappointment was monstrous and her recovery was not speedy. She had a volcanic melt-down in which, through sobs and head-flailing, she managed to explain that we'd agreed. We had a plan. As I was gearing up to give Lucia my you-can't-always-get-what-you-want speech, I experienced a rare moment or maternal clarity. I understood her disappointment. She wasn't asking me out of the blue to take a night walk. We'd agreed and she'd prepared and she had a plan in her mind. So, in our pajamas, after brushing teeth, we put on our boots and walked to the alley to look at the waning crescent moon and the sun setting over the Olympics. It was lovely.

Since that nanosecond of clarity with Lucia, I've been thinking about my own relationship with disappointment. Whether it is my self-restraint keeping me from buying the $300 boots at Anthropologie, my quiet resolution in accepting that Lucia might not go to a bilingual school, or an unrequited crush, I know the feeling of disappointment. "These things are out of my control" I tell myself. My recovery, like Lucia's, is pretty good. I have the moment, and then I'm over it. There is always the part of me that wants to use the credit card or beg the school district or work magic, but mostly I accept my disappointment and move on.

The next line of the song "You can't always get what you want" is "But if you try sometime, you just might find, you get what you need." And it's true. In the midst of accepting that I can't have everything I want, it becomes glaringly clear to me that I absolutely do have what I need.