View this post on Instagram

 

House trance music fills the air as I head home through dark canyons and winding roads.

Eight and a half hours in someone else’s kitchen, and this—just this—is enough.

Long gone are the days of turning to the local news radio station. Once a source of distraction in otherwise dreary traffic, I no longer find solace in hearing about the outside world.

It was not the type of job I had envisioned when I graduated with a Master of Science in Management Science, twenty-five years ago. But it pays the bills and, in some therapeutic way, helps me find my stillness—feeding others with crafted recipes, often the same ones I once used to feed my own family.

Finding stillness is a term I have come to learn and know, especially over the last year or so, but it had its roots in my early stages of transitioning, nearly half a decade ago—a time when the world I had built around myself was coming apart at the seams, and I was learning, slowly, that the woman emerging from that unraveling was someone I actually wanted to know.

Stillness was not something I found then. It was something I began to look for.

Cresting a knoll overlooking the valley, the fog has swallowed everything below. I find the view quietly, unexpectedly peaceful.

Yoga is another place where I find my stillness.

The music drifting through the studio reminds me of the house trance I listen to on my commute. The instructor’s voice is low and unhurried, asking us to find our breath. I have heard these words perhaps a hundred times now, and yet tonight they land differently. There is a version of me that would have found this absurd: a woman with a graduate degree, lying on a foam mat in a chakra-filled, pastel-lit room, being told to notice the space between her inhales.

Memories of my office days surface uninvited. Long days, longer nights away from home, constantly on the move, constantly thinking and overthinking even the simpliest of tasks such as how to write the next email, among the scores already highlighted unread. There is no stillness in the aerospace world. It moves too fast, and “if you can’t keep up, you can’t be on the team” was the lesson I never wanted to learn, until it happened to me.

It was not a dramatic exit.

A simple meeting, unannounced, no raised voices. Just the slow realization that the version of me they had hired no longer existed, and the version standing in her place was not someone they had made room for. I packed a box. I drove home in silence.

There was only quiet.

I have learned what stillness is not: it is not silence.

It is not the absence of the day. It is something that moves in underneath everything else, the way fog moves through a valley—not erasing what is there, but softening its edges until nothing feels quite so sharp. Nor is it something reserved only for the yoga studio.

In Warrior 2 (Virabhadrasana 2), I fix my gaze on a point on the wall, the way I was taught, and for a moment the posture and the breathing become beside the point.

I am here.

My feet are pressing into the earth. Somewhere outside, the working world hums and churns and pivots and disrupts, and I am simply breathing.

There are moments in a long hold where the mind releases whatever it has been gripping. Tonight it is the mental arithmetic of the shift—portions, timing, temperatures—and what rises up instead is something quieter. A memory of my daughter’s face at the dinner table, the night we made broccoli potato soup together. The particular smile of a student asking for dinner on a random Tuesday. The smell of wok hei released from a hot pan onto a plate, which is both the smell of work and the smell of home, and I have stopped being sure there is a difference.

The music swells slightly, then retreats. We are asked to come into child’s pose, and I fold forward, forehead to the mat, and the day—all of it, the canyons and the fog and the eight and a half hours and the master’s degree and the twenty-five years—settles around me like something finally put down.

This is the stillness. No jubilant discovery. Just found. Just arriving at the right time.

~

Enjoy this mindful moment from Erica? Check out their previous article on Elephant Journal that recounts the story of forever family: