My dad turned 82 on Thursday, and two days prior a woman I knew quite well, although decades ago, died at 55. We don’t get to choose when we die, but we do get to choose how we want to live in the world, how we want to be while we are alive…how much we want to live. This is one of the few things that I know is true…that I am going to die, one of these days, and that I have to do the best I can, “play well with others,” each day until it is THE day.  At yoga the other morning, after we had done all sorts of difficult new poses, our teacher said, as we finished up our practice, that the next pose was restorative, we should “relax and settle in, restore, you know, all the Rs” …made me think, so many “R” words are involved in living a life…Reboot-Rejuvenate-Renew-Revitalize-Relax-Recover-Restore and so on and so on and so on.

Regenerate feels like a powerful “R” word, particularly this time of year when all of the roots below earth are preparing for their come-back & got me thinking about how WE regenerate, how we turn around/rotate time and time after time from conflicts, disappointments, bad breaks, trauma, despair, accidents, illness, loss, hurts, wrongs…we come back…event after event…regeneration, if you think about it, it’s a super power really. How easy it would be to give up…be filled with woe with no hope…How easy it would be to just stop trying at all and, well I guess nothingness, or apathy, or maybe depression…but we don’t just roll over and sigh our last sigh whilst waving the figurative white flag of surrender, no, we take a deep breath and we press on…try try again, this thing called life. WE all keep trying.

Release is a word I adore, it feels “clean“…get it out, let it go, clean it up, sweep out the rubbish…release. I hold a lot in, I have an anger and a sadness that hides under my sunny disposition and someday I hope, to be free of that, to truly be released. BUT for now I release my stresses in my own way with another one of my favorite R words, REDO…I redo closets, cupboards, drawers, shelves, files, spaces…I redo all the time. So much about my own self is filled with regret (not a fan at all of this R word) so when I redo/reorder/reorganize things, I get a release and a bit of a rush really…I suppose the “thrill” I get is not much different from the kind people get who go snow boarding or water skiing or mountain climbing…to me it’s as exhilarating, but I am sure somebody who is one of those TypeA sports people would laugh in my face if I compared snowboarding to reorganizing my pantry, but how different we are really does make life interesting doesn’t it??

Reflect might be my favorite of all the R words. I think I do it an awful lot, too much probably, which can in fact be awful…I try not to dwell so using “reflect” at least sounds better! I think of myself as a ponderer, and I joke that I am a seeker of silver linings, and in order to think about situations and circumstances and find a bright side, one MUST reflect. Not the Narcissus kind of reflecting, to care for nothing else, to be totally self absorbed, no not that kind of reflection, but I think of it more as looking at the whole of the parts, or the big picture. For me personally, and the difficult circumstance in my life, over my life, if I look at the whole thing rather than the bits and the pieces I can handle reality better and it doesn’t bite.

Resolve is one of those words that sounds hard, I mean, really, it is, when you think about it…”to find a solution to something” or to “decide firmly on a course of action” these two definitions of this one word are VERY, very, V E R Y difficult for me and this word is a tough one for me on most days in every measurable way. There are things I want to do and things I want to say and I don’t, all the time because my life is easier if I go with the flow of things rather than to resolve the things that are not flowing…if you get my drift…BUT when I do set my mind to something and when I do make a decision, generally it is with a strong resolve.

At the end of yoga we lie flat into what is called the corpse pose, or Shavasana शवासन it is a pose of relaxing and restoring, which sounds fancy, but really it is just lying on your mat and resting. I don’t relax very well in my life in that I always feel like I have to be busy, so those few minutes five or six days a week do feel very good to me. Another “problem” I have, well, not a problem, but something that I reflect upon often is that I am fine and content when I am by myself and like to be alone, and like to find it’s been hours since I spoke to anyone, but then I think, what if it was like that all day every day for the rest of my life…and then I think of another R word that matters, reconnect. I think, more than anything, I am thinking today about reconnecting; reconnecting to the ones we love, and to our deepest true selves, the RELATIONSHIPS we tend to are ultimately what living life is, aren’t they? That might be the most important R word of them all…