The magic of meddling

the intersection of adorable tendencies and antioxidants

Last night instead of my typical Saturday night bath-and-latte-editing time, I watched an entire show on Netflix.

Not an episode, a season.

(It was fine, but it wasn’t so good that I couldn’t tear myself away… I was in pathological avoidance mode.)

Some weeks with drafts (this one included), I fall into a familiar and unhelpful pattern whereby I do something 85% Very Well and then… abandon ship. I’ve done this countless times in my life, and for the past two years and change I’ve endeavored to finish what I start. Phlebotomy training. CHECK. The big and scary Organic Chemistry. CHECK. All the silly assignments and labs and hoops for my courses. CHECK. The enneagram seven isn’t me, so it’s not that I get bored, my problem is that I start too many things with too much ambition and experience the domino effect that is as destructive as free radicals, which I’m studying this week in fatty acid oxidation.

(By the way - I now understand exactly and precisely why we should all be eating berries and leafy greens, and if you want to know, it’s below the paywall as well as freely available via the magic that is Dr. Google).

I’ve written a full memoir and a full pregnancy guide as books. They are stalled at he 85% mark, which isn’t quite good enough to nudge them off the cliff and into the world, but very much sufficient to haunt me.

While much is imperfect, incomplete, and unsent, last night was somehow different.

It feels very much impossible to know what to say at this moment in history, right now.

And.

It feels very much important to keep talking at this moment in history, right now.

Which I was reminded - lovingly - by the person who shares a home and a life and a dog with me this morning.

“Hey, I didn’t get my latte.” He said.

Now he’s typically an aeropress or Americano type, and otherwise refers to coffee & milk as a cappuccino. And in this house, I rarely prepare his morning beverage, so the statement befuddled me momentarily. Until it hit me. My procrastination (and or rogue quitting) was noticed.

“I don’t have anything to say,” I said.

“Write about that,” he said.

So this is that, but also broader.

I’ve noticed a bizarre hesitation in me in the six months I’ve worked in the hospital, and in the EMT class I’m a precarious 80% through. In these certain emerging areas of my life, I’ve moved more tasks and projects to completion, but I haven’t brought the full wholeness of myself until a few weeks ago when another friend gently confronted me about this bizarre absence.

Since 1996, I have taught the yoga to the people, which sounds terribly pompous but actually - if you’ve taken a class with me - you know I don’t usually teach from a self-righteous look-at-my-bod/tell-me-I’m-pretty sort of way. For reasons that surely aren’t entirely selfless, I’ve facilitated connections between the people in the class. YES. I’m the annoying teacher who suggests that - prior to doing anything you thought you were going to do in a yoga class - that you turn to your neighbor and somehow acknowledge their existence.

It could be a wave, a smile, a fist bump, an actual introduction.

To me, this was in fact the most yoga of all the things we would do. I figured if we could all just be in the world, ambassadors of the interconnectedness of everything, that maybe the world would benefit even more than if we all had matching butts or synchronized breathing.

In weekly classes with a character and quality of their own, I would invite anyone who had anything exciting to share to do so aloud. People would share their upcoming nuptials, their new jobs, their new grand offspring, but the most remarkable will always be the first time anyone responded. It was Wes, a middle-aged software engineer who came to my weekly classes with his wife and sometimes one or both of his offsprings.

“I haven’t eaten cheese in a month!” He said.

And I’ll remind you the prompt was “does anyone have anything exciting to share?”

“Can you tell us more about that?”

His daughter, a vegan, had requested his participation in her diet for a period of time in lieu of wrapped gifts for her birthday. And it was enough to set the tone for the weekly share in that class and the prompts I used in every conversation class from then on.

I collect people and connect people, and I meddle in a way that is hopefully mostly productive.

While this is maybe a choice, it’s maybe what I’m here to do. In chatting with a friend about this, I unskillfully referred to my magic as as ‘meddling’ and she stopped me, in a loving, collegial, and direct way. She noticed that I’d started to question.

The yoga was vehicle for my meddling magic, until December 2024, when it wasn’t any more. While I’ve popped back into the seat of the teacher on occasion, I’ve shied away from bringing this part of me into the next chapter of my life - the hospital, and school. I’ve binged a fine-but-nothing-special Netflix series instead of doing the thing. And I’m writing about it in case you have, too.

Your details are different, of course. What you do in the world, as well as your adorable coping mechanisms. But I’m here to say that whatever your meddling is, if you’re stepping back from your own certain magic, that is a major bummer for everyone.

What isn’t unique is that you’re also living inside of a profoundly strange moment in history that may well divide much retelling in a ‘before and after’ way. So I suppose what I’m hoping you might do today is consider if there is something you used to do, or some way you used to be, that you could be again. And that perhaps that way of being might be nourishing for us in the series of afters which are about to unfold.

And, the series of beginnings.

Anyway, thanks for reading,

K