The social summer is just about to begin this weekend, and already I was planning my Fall.
An apartment lost
I have been considering a move to a new apartment after my lease expires in September. I found one with my current management company and put in an application a few weeks ago. A completely gut-renovated 1 bedroom with a private garden. It was going to be spectacular. I’m sure it still will be, but it’s not going to be mine. For financial reasons, it’s better for the management company to accept another application from one of my neighbors who’s been in her rent-controlled 2 bedroom / 2 bath / formal dining room apartment for 27 years. New York real estate, and the current rental market in particular, is a business focused on cold, hard cash.
And relief found
I thought I’d be disappointed with the loss of the opportunity, and all I felt upon hanging up the phone with my real estate agent was an enormous sigh of relief. I felt free of a lot of burdens, some I didn’t even realize I was carrying. It was no coincidence that when I hung up with the agent, I found myself in front of my small Ganesha statue that’s part of my meditation space. (He is known in Hindu scriptures to be the remover of obstacles, and he and I have a long-time understanding that when I don’t get what I want it’s always for my own good.) I had put a number of other options for my Fall on hold because I assumed I’d be busy with packing and moving. Now that I’ll be staying in my cozy studio, all these questions that have been floating around in my mind were completely settled in one fell swoop:
1.) 300 hour yoga teacher training at ISHTA. I attended their info session a few weeks ago and was very impressed with what they had to offer for teachers interested in using yoga for therapeutic purposes, my intended pursuit with Compass Yoga. Now that I won’t be moving, I will be able to make the time to attend their September 2011 – March 2012 program, and my plans for Compass will be right on track.
2.) Volunteer vacations. It’s been about a year and a half since I went to Costa Rica with Cross-Cultural Solutions in 2009, and I’ve wanted to take another volunteer vacation since the moment I got back. I taught yoga in Costa Rica and spent time working with the elders and children in and around Cartago. I’m making plans to travel to Haiti in September to work with my friends who run the nonprofit Healing Haiti. There’s also a possibility with Cross-Cultural Solutions of being one of the first batch of Americans who can legally travel to Cuba again as part of their volunteer program there. More details to come.
3.) No packing means a chance to redecorate. Yesterday I was flipping through a few interior design sites and one of them talked about how important it is for your space to give you a specific feeling every time you return home. That feeling should be the basis of your decorating rather than focusing on specific colors or arrangements purely for aesthetic reasons. Similar to the realization of the power of the question, “Why?” when building dreams, I had the same kind of feeling here. I’ve never thought about the design of my space as having a specific feeling, but rather a specific look. This new perspective gives me all types of design ideas that I’m excited to put into action in my space.
4.) Enjoy summer. I would have spent a good portion of the summer packing, planning,and reconfiguring my life for my new digs. Studies say moving is the most stressful event in our lives next to the death of a loved one. Crazy, but anyone who’s moved, especially in New York City, knows how tough it can be. Now I have the opportunity to just enjoy the summer knowing that Fall will come in due time without the stress of planning a move.
Aside from all of these logistical reasons for being happy about this news, there was a bigger life lesson for me, too. In the past I have been an obsessive planner. My coach, Brian, and I have worked on this area a lot over the past year. I’ve always been someone so worried that plans A, B, and C wouldn’t work out that I had to have back-up plans D, E, and F ready to go at a moment’s notice. This kind of behavior is an enormous waste of time, and sadly it’s served me so well in the past that it became an annoying habit. In the past year I’ve been able to let go of a lot of that.
We can’t possibly plan for every chance event, and to try to do that is a thankless task. I improvise more often now, and more importantly, I trust myself, the universe, and the idea that somehow our lives work out in the best way possible so long as we commit to show up and do our best every day. It’s all I can do, and that’s enough. Lesson confirmed.
Christa Avampato 