Healthy Hindsight

Eventually, at some unforeseeable -- but real -- point in the future, I'll look back on the past year and smile.
June in Vancouver -- even on the grayest days, it's still a dangerously alluring place. Surrounded by the deepest, darkest blue, the lushest green and the sweet pink of cherry blossoms sprinkling the streets -- I can't help but dismiss the out-of-reach real estate and imagined air of superiority.
Taking class this morning on Commercial -- always thick with sweat and struggle -- a gleaming group of satisfied minds and bodies carrying each other through the dimmest places under the light...it was, as it most often is, completely magical. Another practice = another day I have freed myself from the limits, either self-imposed or otherwise, with which so many exist.

It's strange for me, meeting such a plethora of people everyday, observing those who choose to live shackled by the limits they have either created or accepted. As always -- open to every possibility I can or have yet to imagine -- I am feeling my way through the professional options that seem to exist for someone with my particular skill set and interests in Vancouver; I'm still teaching of course (because that is what keeps me emotionally satiated) and have recently ventured into the restaurant scene...an excellent place to quickly gain back lost heartache pounds.
5 nights a week, I play hostess with the mostess to a unsurprisingly rather affluent room of diners. Greeting hungry guests at the door, I can't help but take a quick peek right through them to catch a glimpse of what lies beneath. Those who truly sparkle are governed by the hidden gem tucked away beneath the Prada -- the truest ruby -- often forgotten by the bachelors and bachelorettes dining solo at the bar night after night. I notice the limited souls shelling out hundreds like they're never going to run dry in part because I am deeply fascinated by the human condition -- and in particular, because of the year I've had.

June in Edmonton -- spent pretending I was not about to jump off a cliff into the treacherous waters of marital separation...followed by dragging my breathless body ashore to find the sweetest sunshine bathe me in its warmth.
By August, I found reincarnation as a single mother (still a bizarre term to me, which really fails to do the reality justice). September, October and November split my heart, mind and body between two very different places. The months that followed gave me love in hopeless places, took it away and brought it back. I gained friends and lost others I probably should have denied entry in the first place. I laughed -- a lot...I cried...less. I danced in happiness -- the kind that makes you fly while your feet touch the ground.
I lived without limits.
This summer and beyond, I'll have another healthy dose of the good stuff, just a dash of the bad -- got to have some of the latter to appreciate the former -- and keep allowing the most important muscle I've got to do it's worst.

Life Lessons from the Indelible Britney Spears

Last week. I already pine for you and your final days of summer sun. The grueling schedule I kept of yoga and soaking up the sun at Kits Beach, left me little time for writing, but now the skies are ominous, offering nothing but drear and damp, so I'm back at the keyboard.

Heading home (as in the floor of my sister's bedroom, where I currently occupy a space the size of my couture IKEA mattress) in a haze of yoga high from a thick class on Commercial yesterday, I opted for the always ingenious soundtrack of Miss Britney Spears to accompany me home. Sometimes a girl just needs a little old school to remind her, no matter the current weight of life's circumstances and how unnervingly unforeseeable the future, everything will turn out alright in the end. Take our darling Brit: in the not-so-distant past, she was a completely disheveled (on the inside and out), unhinged, downward-spiraling, fury of destruction. Today, buffed and polished to a finish smooth enough to appear a once again competent mother, partner and artist (that's right, I referred to the princess of pop as an "artist" -- deal with it), she has re-emerged, relatively unscathed and back on top, continuing to dazzle and captivate legions of fans. And because so many worthwhile life lessons come from standout role models like Britney, when the going gets tough, but merits a tone none too somber and just scratching the surface of delicate introspection, her lyrics are full of diamonds in the rough.

Borrowing a gem from one of my faves, from the days of Britney's stellar acting debut in Crossroads I too have re-emerged -- a brighter, unobstructed by the expectations of others, independent version of myself.

"Say hello to the girl that I am! You're gonna have to see through my perspective."

"Overprotected" -- the theme song of life in the Sinclair (my maiden moniker -- we even have a darling tartan) clan. Released about 10 years ago -- about the same time, at 19, most of my girlfriends and I felt similarly hampered by our parents' view of the course our lives should take. Good work Mom and Dad -- I really used the four years I spent at UBC effectively. Because you said something along the lines of, "If you don't go to university right away, you will be an epic failure and no longer a member of the family we will choose to acknowledge. Well, we might acquiesce to identifying your body when the police find it under the Granville St. bridge frozen solid, because you won't survive the winters here sleeping in a box outside, which is the only accommodation you'll be able to afford if you elect to forgo higher education." Yep. I'm pretty sure the open-minded, warm and fuzzy advice of only the best intentions with which my parents provided me went something exactly like that.

At one time, I was a relatively obedient daughter, hoping to glean some affection from the confounding creatures who brought me into being by following a path I thought would appeal to their ideologies of what good girls should do. But never being one to blindly follow the pack and conform to a life that doesn't make me happy, I decided within the first semester of my English Literature Degree to do pretty much whatever I wanted. Sure, I read all the books, but only because I enjoyed them; I handed in all of my papers early and always seemed to do well, never being handed back work with less than an "A" of some description scrawled across the top. But I allowed my science requirements and electives that failed to interest me fall by the wayside, giving me a decent amount of recreational time -- which of course I filled with partying.

I managed to work my way through a solid roster of lovers, friends and everything in-between. I thought at least the life experience I gained from experimenting with what I wanted and didn't want in the people I kept close to me would prove useful, but thus far, I am still somewhat clouded with those silly lures that so often accompany short-lived unions -- you know -- a look, a touch, a smell, a certain mystery; something extraordinary that is magnetic but sadly doesn't turn out to have staying power or realness. I did, after all, manage to marry a man I hardly knew at all, but did he ever have a je ne sais quoi -- like none other.

Anyone who has played the game of love, lust and all necessary and unnecessary associated evils knows the couples that last are (much more complex than it sounds, trust me) the ones in which two people genuinely like each other; they have to laugh with each other, listen to and actually appreciate most of what escapes one another's mouths, so much so that just words can turn the wheels in the brain that ignite the fire in the heart -- and other, much lower regions in the body equally important in maintaining a certain level of interest and intensity between successful lovers. However rare, such connections do of course exist. One can choose to need them, want them, or simply settle for whatever comes -- or nothing at all.

I"ll take one of everything please. I'll see whatever comes; if it's not what I need and want, they'll be something just around the corner that is. "I need time, love, joy; I need space; I need me." If I ignore the expectations of others in the process, the only disappointment they truly experience will be their own -- in themselves.