My Inner Mimm wants to be a slob. A female Oscar Madison minus the cigar. Fortunately, living in a studio apartment prevents me from embracing her. There has to be a sense of order when you live in a small space and although my lack of domestic skills occasionally run amok (as I’m the only dish washer, I’ve been known to wait until I’ve run out of clean bowls before I take care of the dirty ones), by and large I have ‘a place for everything and everything in its place’.
Lists are a guide to putting everything in its place – including, perhaps, our feelings and emotions. I created a list a few days ago, wrote about it here, then worried that it might corral my recently opened heart safely back into the archival box it had sheltered in for the past five years. I guess, too, a list tethers us in the present. There’s still enough slack on the line to look at the past or float into the future, but the list will always gently tug us back to the here and now.
Maybe that’s part of the reason opening ourselves to the possibility of love and connection is so frightening. It’s too easy to abandon the here and now. We abandon what we believed was certain (our list) to share the care and feeding of our heart and emotions with someone else. We acknowledge our vulnerability.
It feels a bit like dropping into Wheel or Upward Bow Pose. We arch back, unable to see our destination and yet we still reach. We trust. We know that our hands will find the floor, and that we won’t be hurt. Midway through, however, there’s a moment of doubt – Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea? But just when we consider letting go of the pose – losing the faith that brought us this far – our hands blindly reach one more inch. Our back bends deeper than we thought it could – we’re capable of more than we ever believed – and our heart opens wide.
Mimm Patterson 