A Course in Obstacles

"Life is all about living with obstacles. Everything's an obstacle." 

When your twelve-year-old utters a statement like this, you cannot help but remain quiet for fear the wisdom will fly straight out of the window instead of settling about you like fairy dust, ready to grant you, not necessarily the next desire on your long list of wishes, but a bit of perspective that had momentarily gone missing. Of course, such an utterance makes you speechless as a parent, too, because you suddenly become aware that your child is doing the thing she was meant to do. Not only is she growing up, she is growing beyond you as her parent, and, one day, she really will be living life on her own, which also means on her own terms.

It is a brave and foolish thing, raising children. From the get-go, they are both obstacle and source of transformation. (Not so very unlike all those yoga poses you intend to master.) Throughout your lives together, you are engaged in a dance of guilt and forgiveness. Sometimes the music changes, but more often, old scores are replayed. Only the partners--parent and child--remain constant. Occasionally, as parent, you get a glimpse of the good you have done, but it's more like a support beam in a home: Absolutely essential to the foundation, but otherwise a part of the background easily ignored. As it should be, I suppose. After all, it's difficult to maintain hero status in life. Just ask Lance Armstrong. Or anyone who tries to be a good step-parent, teacher, soccer referee, or (substitute role model of your choice).

My twentieth wedding anniversary is right around the corner, and because I married a man who had been married before, I not only said "I do" to a husband, my nuptial vows included an agreement to honor and protect his child, who was six on the day we were married. It's a good thing I was so entirely naive. Let's just say my learning curve was a whole lot steeper than the one I accepted when I took up the practice of Ashtanga at the age of 48. Now, looking back on my wedding day twenty years later, if I am honest, being naive was not the difficult part. The difficult part was expecting so much of myself, believing I had to be hero, savior and saint. Naturally, I also expected to enjoy the bliss of being a new bride. The truth is, when you expect this much of yourself, you expect the same of those around you, which, in this case meant my husband, his ex-wife and their child. And while expectation is not a bad thing, you can make a lot of people miserable when what you expect is unrealistic, particularly if you do not think it is.

Thanks to my current yoga and meditation practice, some earlier years in therapy, many, many, many, many, many (I could go on) mistakes, and a generous amount of humility and perseverance, after 20 years of marriage, I can acknowledge now that I was often my own greatest obstacle. I seem to have excelled at  being in my own way over and over again. But, then, where else would I have been? Is not this the place of the student, not at the foot of the master, but at the place of adversity? Or perhaps they are one in the same--the foot of the master is the place of adversity. Among the writings of St. John of the Cross is a poem called "Development." In it, St. John asks God, "How do you teach us?" Gods responds with the following analogy:  "If you were playing chess with someone who had infinite power and infinite knowledge and wanted to make you a master of the game, where would all the chess pieces be at every moment? Indeed, not only where he wanted them, but where all were best for your development."

Indeed, Indeed. 

In her book Poser, my life in twenty-three yoga poses, author Claire Dederer writes about yoga, of course, but also about her marriage, her family, her parents, her life, and her long-held ideas about how good we have to be. One of her musings about her marriage, with its unique brand of ordinary and disappointment and what-ifs, reveals this bit of wisdom, which I appreciate after so many years of living my own experience of the institution. Dederer writes: "Maybe each trial didn't make another chink in the armor of marriage, bringing it to its inevitable point: divorce. Maybe each trial made a marriage."

So, maybe each trial, every obstacle makes a marriage in the same way that our entire journey here--the hills and the valleys--makes a life. We don't get to pick and choose the parts we keep and the pieces we would prefer to leave unacknowledged. Of course, we can live this way, admitting no obstacles, and erasing or editing those we could not avoid. Like Mitt Romney's attempt to "etch-a-sketch" his way into the White House, we can choose to accept the illusion as the truth. However, I prefer to abide by the words of a fictional cripple who turns out to be the ultimate healer (and ultimately healed) in Barbara Kingsolver's formidable piece of literature The Poisonwood Bible. Looking back on all the lessons life taught her, Adah Price concludes, "We are the balance of our damage and our transgressions."

Life is all about living with obstacle. Everything's an obstacle. Interpreted correctly, that should make breathing a whole lot easier...at least for today.