Nurturing our Nature

An old friend of mine, one of the sweetest human beings on this earth, had just gone through a divorce. Life was unfair, I told myself. If anyone deserved to be happy it was most certainly her but she was most certainly not happy. Left with a heavy heart, she was also left with her ex-husbands surname. And she kept it - not because it was inconvenient to change back to her maiden name, but because she acknowledged her marriage had been a huge part of her life. It had contributed to who she was - an idea that I pondered briefly on. But the thought escaped my mind, until it once again manifested itself this January, while reading a book (quite the mathematician as a child, I never had a penchant for reading - this had been one of only a handful of novels I had read). I was poring over "A Long Way Down" by Nick Hornby, now my favorite book. The four protagonists meet for the first time on top of a building infamously linked to many recent suicides. While some had mulled over the idea more than others, each had decided to leap to their deaths. That is, until they met each other and began, forlorn of hope, to share their hatred of the world and their thoughts of hopelessness and regret. How had it all come to this? A line that sticks with me was uttered by JJ, an American man whose band had recently broken up. On top of this, he had just been dumped by his girlfriend and, on a whim, had decided that recent events were sufficient grounds to end it all. When telling her story to the other three she noted that "we are what's happened to us". While not a phrase that appeared deep or required me to get my dictionary out, this really made me think about how I've become who I am. Just like yoga poses each leave an impression - a samskara - on the body, our experiences leave indelible marks on our souls. Thus, while Nature may play a large role in who we are (e.g. my father is European and my mother Asian - I look somewhat like both of them), what we go through really makes us. Blessed with the most awesome of parents, my brother and I are lucky peeps. Not being one to express himself much (maybe it's a Swiss thing), one day my father nevertheless was talking to me about my brother and I and how we were very different. He said he was proud of us both. This made me excited as I had never once heard him use "proud" and "David" in the same sentence. He also noted how my brother, a handsome young man, lived vivaciously in the moment: partying, dating, motorbiking and skydiving his way to happiness. I, according to dad, was the quiet one who would live for the future. Whether it was studying for an exam or saving money (for God knows what), I would be 100% prepared. In the event of an emergency I would not only have a piggy bank full of cash under my bed but also the long division skills necessary to figure out how many days we could survive for (c.f. "Life of Pi" by Yann Martel, my second favorite book). Disaster never did strike though, but what eventually did strike me was how right my dad was. So enough about the past. And the future, well that's too difficult to predict. Just ask Patanjali, whose teachings were compiled more than two thousand years ago into the aphorisms present in the Yoga Sutras, the bases of classical yoga. If reading them seems like a challenge for your patience then simply take the first two words "atha yoga" (yoga is now) as your mantra. Be here and be now. I never have lived in the moment but I really want to see what I can do to change that. Maybe this Patanjali guy was onto something :)

N.B. The books "A Long Way Down" and "Life of Pi" will soon become movies. YAY!!!