take away

The finish line of the Boston Marathon is about two blocks from my favorite yoga studio, which is about as close as I get to going to church. I head in two mornings a week, roll out my mat and reset. My practice is tremendously important to me; it is the one way I know to recalibrate every part of myself: physical, emotional, mental. This morning was no different and I needed to be there a lot. The city itself was alive with people, headed to work, grabbing coffee and, as always, jaywalking in front of my car as I edged around the corner from Berkeley Street on to Boylston.



I have struggled a bit over the past few days on what to say about what happened on Monday here. After all, this is just a simple spot where I share photos of my lunch and maybe a couple self deprecating jokes or funny stories; hardly the place you would look to seek words of comfort or wisdom at a time when the world stops making sense. Besides, everyone that knows me knows that I am the world’s biggest cry baby and nobody ever looks to be soothed by the person crying the hardest. After all, they might get boogies on them during the hug.



But as my most favorite instructor said this morning, echoing my sentiments more eloquently than I ever could, it would feel fairly negligent to ignore what happened on Monday. So I won’t. But I’m not going to try to offer advice on how to make sense of the senseless or prove how much I love my town (I don’t have any, anyways (do you?); and believe me: I do very much). I’m not going to even attempt to pretend that I could possibly say anything as immensely good hearted and necessary as this, or even try and be as perfectly appropriately funny as this.



Instead I will just say that among the horrendous images that I’ve seen this week I’ve noticed a lot of one thing in particular: people hugging, clinging to each other, offering everything they possibly could to comfort someone else. Because when the shit hits the fan, we turn to each other, we don’t turn our backs. Not just people from Boston, but human BEINGS. We’re so much better than we even think we can be, so much stronger and nicer and more honest. And this has been thematic in most of the things that I’ve read this week. Horrible things happen all over the world, every day to people who don’t deserve it. FACT. But in the face of this we have to choose to be good to one another, not just in the aftershock of unspeakable violence, but in line at the grocery store. So while it goes without saying that I am sad about Marathon Monday and I am grieving for all the lives traumatized, gravely injured or cut way too short, I really want to take away from this a renewed sense of faith in people’s innate goodness. And next week I promise, I’ll get right back to baked stuffed eggplant and fart jokes.