I am the Director of Yoga at a studio that holds six students.
The title is hilarious given the context, and I’ve always joked in a self-deprecating way that I’m the biggest fish in the smallest pond.
When I first learned that we would be expanding the yoga studio into a second location, I started on the lists. Ideas for classes. People to contact. Props to order. In my Trello [project management software] I have a whole board for this.
My visioning and planning did not include five weeks of vertigo immediately preceding the opening, nor did it include losing the yoga manager on the team, hiring a new one, and losing her a day later. Normally I’m great at catastrophic thinking, overplaying, and worrying, but even my sweet little mind couldn’t conceive of these particular chutes.
Friday, July 29th at 2pm, we passed the final of a gauntlet of building inspections and received the certificate of occupancy, with a plan to hold our first class on Monday at 10am. No big deal, yoga is easy. It’s an empty room with maybe some sound and possibly some props. Enso opened much the same way, with a bar of soap and a roll of toilet paper, and a mad dash of sweeping and mopping.
Of course, White Lotus is principally a massage space, and massage requires an unreasonable amount of stuff: fancy tables, noise cancelling air filtering things, and sheets for days. So the sweet and wonderful humans on the team loaded hundreds of boxes into a caravan of cars and schlepped it all two miles from our OG location to the new space.
Somewhere along the way, all of the props on my spreadsheet had been ordered, delivered, and moved (who am I?!). We unwrapped and unboxed, a painstaking process in today’s world of cellophane plastic wrap - each block, each eye pillow, each bolster.
The starchy, unwashed blankets from Veracrúz were tightly bound in bundles of 10 and then shrink wrapped, holding their shape tightly together even after I had snipped all of their wrapping. In the years of owning Enso, I learned that washing brand new blankets in one’s home washer and dryer is a one-way ticket to laundry repair humans and a $150 repair bill.
These would need to go to the laundromat.
I would need to take them there.
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