About three months ago I became one of those people who did yoga. I'm not going to try and downplay it, I absolutely love it.
Just because I've found that I love it doesn't mean I'm any good at it though. In fact I love it precisely because I’m not good at it, because it doesn’t matter so I don’t care. Which means I get to have at least 3 hours a week where I don’t care if what I’m doing is perfect. More if I do classes at home. The only other time I’m not worried about building a life I love and achieving all my dreams is when I’m sleeping - and then I seem to spend most of that time cheating on my dream-partner or trying to stop myself being murdered by zombies.
My legs are long. When you're trying to put them behind your head that's a huge advantage, I spend a whole lot of time with my thighs right up in my face and nothing will help you appreciate the abilities your body more than having it all wrapped around you. When it works with me just the way I ask it too I love it and this is only enhanced when I do yoga videos in my room in only my underwear. Something that definitely helped me get used to myself, I can’t hide from myself and I no longer want to.
Sometimes though, the long legs are less of an advantage. Trying to reach my toes is a real challenge and one I can’t imagine ever overcoming. There's just so much thigh until you get to my feet and I struggle to see how I'm going to make my upper-body long enough to reach over it.
I can't even roll up the mat properly at the end of the class without having the re-roll it a couple of times. I tried to roll it whilst I was walking out of class and nearly fell over it.
I have no balance and yoga is really big on balance. The only thing I find harder than standing upright on one leg is standing on both of them. That isn't even a joke, one leg is about half an inch shorter so standing equally on both feet is actually very uncomfortable. My spine isn’t straight. Yoga loves straight lines and my body doesn't have any. I might never do a headstand or the splits.
I will probably never make a yoga instructor or even a half-decent Instagram poser, that's what I'm saying.
I don't have to be good at it because I haven't dedicated my life to being good at it. I do plenty of things I'm not good at. I go running and I'm not spectacular at that either. I learn languages even though I find that incredibly difficult. I swing between child-like excitement at learning new things and a very adult amount of swearing when I get something wrong.
If I was going to write a book about being in Jordan I would call it Jamal Waheed, because just when I thought I’d mastered the numbers in Arabic and used them to identify a singular camel on the side of the road, the whole car started laughing at me. The word for ‘1’ is wahad. Waheed means lonely. Close, but not my intention to comment on the emotional state of camels. There is no better story that demonstrates the ways in which I find Arabic an absolute and completely impossible challenge. Guess who still tries to speak it every day.
I am not perfect, nothing I do, is perfect. I am not one of those people who excels at everything they try, I don't find that success just comes to me without even trying. I don't learn languages easily, my muscles don't contort themselves easily, I don't even find writing comes to me without being a challenge. I would advocate more people admitting when they find things hard and doing things they're not that great at and continuing to do them anyway.
Our encouragement (especially sports, especially women) to try things always stems from the idea that we might be great at them - from success stories against the odds. But what if our drive to try new things was actually that we never need to be good at them, that paying the money for the class means you can go and be as damn well good at them, or not, as you want to be. You can keep going, not even getting any better if you don't want to train at home, and just enjoy it. Just do you for an hour. You can learn languages your whole life and never be quite fluent. You can just do stuff without having to be perfect at doing it. Which sounds pretty good to me.
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