You know how things go wrong at the most inconvenient times? Like forgetting to put washer fluid in the car only to find that on that specific day there is muddy water everywhere? Well, military spouses go through a test phase every time their spouse leaves for a consecutive number of days. He could prepare everything for his departure, and the house can be as organized as ever, but once he is too far to help, things will fall apart. It doesn’t matter who you are, where you live, this phenomenon has hit most military wives I have spoken to. It’s just a fact of nature. An example from the past is when J was in in Afghanistan and the cops came to his condo looking for the previous owner. It was 7 in the morning, I had just prepared my coffee, I was in my robe, and I heard a very loud knock on the door: “police open up”. I’m not kidding. Try explaining to two cops that the owner is your boyfriend who is not here at the moment, and that the person they are looking for no longer lives here. That’s just one random example.
Well, J has been gone now for almost a week (out of six) and:
1. I mistakenly put too much oil into my car (after having an extensive tutorial and training by J) making my car useless to me for three days. Thankfully I worked across the street at the base for the two work days without a vehicle. The Saturday I spent at home (I’ll discuss that in a bit).
2. For the first time EVER I got locked out of the house. I had to sadly watch as my very confused cat wondered why I wouldn’t come inside, waiting for a locksmith, only to find that he opened my door with a credit card (I’m not kidding) and charged me 80.00 to basically break into my house.
I want to be clear, I am not complaining here. This is just a fact, once the spouse leaves, the remaining person will come across random fluke problems that had never occurred before.
The surprising thing about all of this, is that a couple of years back these two events would have led to a lot of anxiety, anger that J was away, and overall negativity. But instead, the Saturday I was locked in the house (I live on base and the nearest anything is 8km away south, or 10 km away north) so walking for groceries was out of the question) I cleaned the WHOLE house. I even put on calm music from songza and attempted an active meditation while cleaning. It was a great day. While before I would have panicked that I was locked inside, I took the opportunity to clean and be introspective.
When I got locked out of the house, I had a similar reaction. Of course, having a friend with me helped, but even then in the past, I would have returned home exhausted and depressed due to the events of the day. Instead, I didn’t let it affect me. It was just a random thing that happened, and letting it ruin an otherwise very nice day would have been a shame.
Don’t think that the irony of one day being locked in my house, and the next being locked out has been lost on me, because it hasn’t. In both circumstances I was limited to what I could do, something that would have sent my world crumbling down before.
I believe that there is a lesson here. I think I lost my way in yoga. Not to say that curiosity is a bad thing, but i let that curiosity consume my practice, and lost site of the journey. Yoga has taught me many things, and I believe these two experiences were meant to happen because I needed a reminder: you don’t do yoga, yoga remakes you.
In these particular situations, I insinctively breathed through the problem, and instead of panicking or having a fight or flight response, I remained calm and looked at the big picture: these were not end of the world problems, they were inconvenient, but not horrible. Instead of wasting time and energy worrying and being angry, I took the opportunity in both examples to remain in the moment. Just like that quote on Facebook says can you change anything? No – then why worry?
Lesson learned universe, lesson learned 🙂
Living yoga in a military wife's life 