A seagull pooped in my coffee yesterday. Three things leading up to the incident made it feel more tragic than comical to me.
- First, for a full week I had wanted to squeeze in an extra thirty minutes on my way back home from my morning walk, where I would get coffee from a local favorite coffee shop and saunter back home. But every day I told myself “nah another day, I’ll just stick to my usual routine, get back home and brew a pot.” Until today, of course. So finally making this extended coffee date with myself happen in the morning felt special. And then randomly spoiling it before I could enjoy a second sip felt like particularly bad luck. (Why, seagull? Why me?)
- Second, I experienced this on the morning of daylight savings when the clock springs forward by an hour, which means I sacrificed on sleep time to go out. Obviously, my decision felt even more precious. (Why, seagull? Why today?)
- Finally, to make this whole solo morning walk under open blue skies with built-in chill out time happen, I had decided upon the scenic, longer route by the water. Yeah, the same one frequented by, and probably home to those frequent fliers. (Dammit seagull, I should have known!)
Coming back to the inciting event, we can see that there is no real tragedy here of course, and for that I am grateful. I am also aware that just saying that it felt tragic is in itself comical – exaggeration always tickles our funny bone. So why am I writing this in my yoga series?
For one, I wanted to record, as background for my yoga practice, an “oh well, sigh” kind of day. Not the meaningfully, substantially sad kind of day. Not the vulnerable, pain cracking-you-open kind of day. Just the meh kind that make you mentally note “I’ve had better moments than this.” If the day was a seesaw with good on one end and bad on the other, this incident would place a sandbag ever-so-slightly closer to the bad. Such that now when you’re walking home, coffee-less, and you miss multiple green lights in a row, your phone battery runs out, and upon reaching home you discover that you’re out of coffee filters, the seesaw swings, flinging the good end into the air as the sandbag slides down menacingly and lodges the unlucky plank into the ground. At this point you might wearily/groggily/crabbily (take your pick) update your estimation to “it’s just not my day today, is it?!”
The other reason I write this is because it is flows imperfectly after my previous caption accompanying my sirsasna pose that I posted on my instagram account, “unfathomable, immeasurable: life, sublime.” That was such an open, expansive kind of feeling. The kind where you are looking at the bay beyond the crumbling stone ledge, the small specifics, in some sense outside of yourself. In contrast, this current snapshot is the sort that puts you back in yourself, acutely experiencing the “i-ness” in things. A separation from the larger fabric of the universe. This rip in the continuum seems like a good backdrop in which to ask myself, “alright yogi, how do you feel about that now? is life still sublime?”
With every passing year, I find the exercise of reconciling diverging experiences utterly delightful. And while I don’t wish bird droppings in your coffee, I hope that you too take delight in observing the full range of your human experience. At times we may feel like we are in the fold of oneness, and at other times as if we’re cut off (the mean seagull, me, you, the day itself), but perception aside, life, mysteriously enough, is still connected. And if that realization isn’t sublime, I don’t know what is.