In my Pilates personal training studio class – and right there you already know so much about me – my instructor, a stunning woman who clearly practices what she preaches, adorned in matching compression tights and workout top, advised us to close our eyes in order to find the muscle she was attempting to awaken from its coma. So I did close my eyes – I am not unused to doing this, it happens frequently for balance torture as well – and I enter my inner space. After four years, no five years, can it really be five years – isn’t that exactly what you would expect me to say? – of Pilates, I’m beginning to master the navigation of this inner realm. I can travel to the spot that theoretically should be about near my ass, and I can just barely feel one or other of the glute muscles that she’s always suggesting that I “recruit.” Which has to date been a largely fruitless endeavor until this one time I manage to feel and pull the one across the top that pulls the front of the leg around and turns your knee outward. Later I will go around like an elementary school child performing their snaps, clicks, whistle-like things, and awkward thumbs or elbows. But I – as you probably have suspected – a mild and mannered (and yes that accurately describes me – middle aged woman (ok, I really list like the alliteration) – I go around to my colleagues at work standing like a duck to show my normal stance and then straightening my feet, which in my pronating case – turns my knees inward – I squeeze my butt to prove that they too can fix their falling arches and plantar fasciitis (terms that middle aged office workers are quite familiar with). I do this completely without shame, bouncing from a sparse, leave-me-alone or omg – there’s so much to do – furnished office of one colleague, and then over to low walled, protectionless cube that has been Feng shued and blasted with personality – as if all of who she is couldn’t fit inside of her and it burst out in photographs and pinned art and unrememberable chochkies.
During this I am so in the present that my brain sings along. There’s no room for what my grandma called wool-gathering. I am completely there. I’ve figured out how to trigger that lost muscle by myself. There’s no need to go spelunking into my inner space. It’s like when you are at an extra special, hold onto the invitation afterward event, and there’s no way for you to photograph the experience from your perspective. You can only hope that someone else has taken a picture of it – either literally – or figuratively in the sense that they can call up some image of the scene and rifle through it for details.
Later I rush down Allston Ave on my bike trying to get the light, trying to determine if the car flying by me will pull in front to do a right hand turn – the dreaded right hand turn without signal that all cyclists live in fear of – focusing and anticipating and pushing those Pilated to exhaustion muscles just that little bit more – the rest of the world is out of my realm – it exists on a different plane. If a dog ran into the street in front of me – we’d both regret it. The car signals at the last minute, pulls in front of me with enough space for me to whip around to the left side and ride that yellow across four lanes of 5pm commuter frustrated filled San Pablo. Disaster avoided.