Friday, December 7, 2007

now

I've never pulled it off, the six months outside for an hour at dawn. And it's not something I'm going to pull off now, or possibly ever. First because it's winter in Montreal and dawn happens sometime around when my seven year old son and I are eating breakfast, just before he heads off to school. Maybe some year I will train him to make his own breakfast while I stand in a dark cold park imitating leafless trees. But not this year. Thank God, because last week we had a snowstorm and several days of gentle flurries that yielded a good three feet of snow.

I have pulled off six months of standing, from about twenty minutes to a half an hour, and I would say that I changed. I changed in gentle, pleasant ways. I lost about ten pounds and have managed to keep it off without much struggle. The journalism I do for a living comes more easily and seems to attract more readers. During the time I started daily standing, about two years ago, the perfect apartment, a lovely school for my son, and a neighborhood I adore seemed to magically enter our lives.

But other problems I've always had continue to plague me. I've been working on a novel for two years that has not seemed to evolve beyond a box of scrappy drafts. The bit of debt I seem to be going into each month has now added up to more than I make in a year, which fortunately isn't much. Whatever romance occassionally enters my life tends to fizzle up pretty fast. And the basic skills of household organization are as mysterious, exotic and elusive to me as musical compostion probably is to the average North American. I do try, but I just don't seem to get it, and as I write this, mess surrounds me.

Last year I went back to the Chinese community center, but Ringo had given up teaching to devote more time to his family and the fast food chinese concession stand he owned in Le Faubourg Saint Catherine. In his place was Ron, who had always taught the Saturday classes, and now taught both weekend mornings. I happened to join back in on a day when Ron was teaching the vertical palm trick. I proudly announced that I did this everyday, sometimes close to thirty minutes, and he received this news with a disappointing amount of indifference. "There's a saying in Chinese, that goes something like, the chi doesn't start boiling until 40 minutes." Ron, you may have guessed is not Chinese. He's actually an articulate, excellent teacher, but he has an arrogance that I've never found quite as charming as Ringo's. He shrugged with a slightly condescending grin and told me that 20 to 30 minutes is considered just playing.

So I began to work towards 40 minutes with a sense of commitment that comes and goes. Today I can stand longer, much longer than I used to, in a range of poses that would probably astonish and impress many people. But with greater skill has come greater resistance. 20 minutes was something I could commit to daily. 40 minutes feels like a sense of purpose that I'm not entirely sure I want to have.