Enjoy the Transitions
Most of the people I know, myself included, function after a very simple scheme: set a target, go for it and ideally celebrate your wins… or just keep on going for the next target. Life is a constant chase of new goals, new experiences, and new aims.
I feel it, I do. I belong to that group that cannot sit still, whose speed of life often gets to supersonic levels, who mostly chase more than one goal and juggle several major projects simultaneously. You get the point…
Nevertheless, I have spent the last couple of months thinking a lot about life (it probably has something to do with getting older) and one sentence I have heard from one of my yoga teachers kept spinning in my head for weeks. “Enjoy the transitions” was the phrase.
In the context she used it, more related to the transitions between the yoga asanas. Transitions are probably one of the most important things in the yoga practice since most of accidents happen while entering or exiting an asana. One moment of not paying attention to the now, chasing the final goal (in this case the final asana) without honouring the transitions, can end up in injury.
I have got to ask myself, if this is what we do in life too? I see myself and others running around in circles ticking boxes on bucket lists (or whatever lists everybody has), only to add new points to it and keep on chasing them. Are we all running through life? “Enjoy the transitions” could also mean that “life is what happens while you are busy making other plans”. Is life that crazy chase? That exhausting race?
Life is really what we make out of it… It can also be a deep breath and a smile in a moment of complete chaos. That breath becomes then the breath of life, bringing joy, clarity, and new energy into the moment.
Life can be talking to a friend when you have so many interconnected, twisted and puzzled up plans, that you cannot find the exit out of that self-made maze all by yourself anymore. That trusted outside view can give you a new perspective and help you out (literally sometimes 😊).
Life is enjoying the path you are walking in this exact moment, giving yourself into the journey and not focusing on the destination. It is admitting that you are lost, while understanding that the road you chose and perfectly planed in the beginning might not have been the right one for you. Life is accepting that through being lost you’ve (be)come (in)to something better than your wildest and most optimistic dreams.
Life is that moment when the “veil of confusion” lifts. For a moment everything stands still, and you understand what is happening around and within you. You see that you are stressed, confused, and lost. And the magical thing is, that in the moment you understand that are trapped in your own chaos, you are observing your situation. You turn from the one being affected into the one observing. This transition (Subject / Observer) is liberating and releases you from the drama of the moment.
After all, life is just a large collection of transitions into (hopefully) achieved goals. What really matters is how good we were able to celebrate every single moment, regardless of how wild, unorganised, chaotic, or out of control it might have seemed. If we learn to enjoy the transitions and to shift into the observer mode when we are overwhelmed, we will probably see how far we have already come, how lucky we are to be alive, how beautiful it is to feel the “now” and how much more there is to look forward to. When we live in this awareness, we understand that the good, bad, messy, and joyful moments are all adding up into shaping the experience of life.
I will now try to follow my own advice, take a deep breath, and see what can still be sorted out of the current self-made chaos… And if that does not work, I will just go into observer mode and enjoy overseeing the glorious mess happening as we speak. I know that then, at the latest, I’ll have an impressive show to look forward to…