Becca Faith Yoga

Since Monday morning I’ve been coping with the inescapable truth of impermanence.  I woke up to a steady drip.drip.drip emanating from somewhere in the bathroom; on closer inspection, I discovered water leaking from a pipe in the ceiling.  The situation was compounded by another mysterious noise, something akin to wild boars whirling on ice skates, I think, coming from my beloved Mac.  It felt like Monday didn’t just sneak in, shame-faced, after a glorious weekend, but instead got decked out in leather chaps and a string of pearls and slid down the banister boasting jazz hands and a top hat.

A call into my well-intentioned but wildly-inept (and rather lazy) Super brought a parade of plumbers into my apartment.  At this point, the situation in our bathroom had progressed: lights were flickering on and off, water had started to pour out of the light fixture, and a mysterious smell — something like burning artichokes — seemed to be carried in via the dark brown water now covering the floor, toilet, and walls.  The plumber’s verdict? Razing the building is likely the only way to correct all of its problems.

Needless to say I was feeling really frustrated, irritated, upset — the standard suite of feelings we feel when impermanence dons a pair of brass knuckles and smacks you in the face.  I was feeling really helpless and hopeless and really, I was doing everything possible to keep my composure because flipping out — while tempting — does little to help these situations, when suddenly my new neighbor popped her head in the door and said hello.

That’s when everything shifted.

I gave her a freshly-baked oatmeal raisin cookie and we sat on my couch commiserating about our dilapidated building and chatting about our love of Brooklyn & how we came to be there.  She looks a lot like Winona Rider and I suddenly felt like I was right in the middle of a scene from Reality Bites, except I realized that would make me Jeanine Garofolo so I let go of that fantasy post-haste.  Eventually we both had to leave and abandoned our plumber baby-sitting duties and went our separate ways.  I came home to find that nothing in my apartment had been fixed; dirty water still drip.drip.dripped from the ceiling, and now I couldn’t use the lights so my bathroom was just a wet, dark mess.  My neighbor came home to find that her bathroom ceiling had been completely removed and most of the drywall was in her tub.  Wine-inhalation commenced almost immediately.

We were soon joined by Winona’s brother, her roommate, and my boyfriend, and the night quickly turned into an impromptu soiree complete with fire-escape squatting and lots & lots of laughter.  It turns out that on the other side of my water-stained, crumbling, too-thin walls live two unbelievably friendly, easy-going, amazing girls. And once again out of chaos, comes brilliance…

It’s Wednesday now and as of last night, the drip.drip.dripping stopped and everything is back the way it was. My neighbors still don’t have a ceiling, but we spent last night eating dinner together in my apartment, so they didn’t have to think about it too much.  And today I’m blogging on Winona’s computer, which she graciously let me borrow while my new Mac is in transit.

A lot of our lessons in impermanence are harsh and painful — the death of a loved one or the loss of an object we’re attached to or the dissolution of a friendship we had come to rely on.  I feel so incredibly fortunate that this lesson came with sweetness and laughter and good wine — it’s a rarity and I know it and I’m grateful. Because the thing is, I was really tempted to shut down in the face of chaos and treat an impermanent situation like an abiding, forever situation.  I wanted to let my irritation bloom so that it could be bigger than the chaos in my apartment, so big that the chaos would shrivel up and die.  Because naturally, being upset and crying and complaining is deeply satisfying when our ability to beat our lives into submission fails.

The universe handed me an alternative — a way to greet impermanence and the resulting chaos with equanimity.  Here was the opportunity to put aside all of my reactions — my attachment to functional plumbing, my aversion to its epic failure  – and instead cultivate open-heartedness, curiosity, and friendliness.  Meeting my new neighbor brought me back to the present, shifted me away from getting wrapped up in my thoughts, and helped me contextualize what was happening in the grand scheme of things (where plumbing debacles are not, in fact, a reason to lose your shit).  In that one moment, the truth of my situation became perfectly clear, and as a result my instinctive reactions fell away.

I can’t say if I’ll be lucky enough to get another wake-up call from the universe next time things start to fall apart, but I’m hoping I’ll remember that impermanence leads to chaos, and that chaos is impermanent, too. If you let both arise, abide and dissolve in their time, things might not return to the way they were — they might be better.