3 minute read
Yoga Is A Prayer by Editor-In-Chief Kellyn McGee
Part of my teen angst was this: for a long time I’ve said I’m just a little bit late to the party. Not *too* late – the party is still going strong, but I arrive after people have gotten food or drinks, found comfortable places to sit, and conversations are deep and midway to solving the problems of the world.
I didn’t (always) feel left out, just on the periphery. More than anything, I’ve felt this metaphorically my whole life and wondered where and how it started. It probably came from the number of different schools I attended, as my parents were always looking for “better” for me. I appreciate their effort, even as some things (like connections and stability) were – or felt — lost. Today, I am grateful for the friendships I made in high school and, even more so, the good attributes of social media. It has forged reconnections with classmates I spent only a few years with but with whom I’ve celebrated achievements and cried over losses with for more than a decade.
But, as I think back to high school and look beyond teen angst, I realize the girl in this picture, who was about to leave home at 17:
• Found a way of walking her own path. This picture was taken as I was about to head off to college in a foreign city, one I’d visited once on a school trip in the 7th grade. No one in my immediate family had gone to college out of state and certainly not a 10-hour car ride away. I was excited and nervous but faced fully forward toward an unpaved road.
• Is a risk taker..? A friend called me that and I immediately disagreed. We were talking about how I left a job I liked to be part of the founding faculty of a law school. A brand new law school, in a city I loved visiting but would have to move to, at probably the worst time to start a law school. A big risk. And I loved it.
• Zigged and zagged her way to her “place.” I didn’t know what I wanted to be after college. I chose business as a major but pretty soon into my freshman year changed to hotel management. My parents tried to talk me out of it (“you should have something more general”), but my persistence rewarded me with a life-long love of the travel and tourism industry. I went to law school (because I “needed” another degree), thinking I would stay in the travel industry, but graduated unsure of where I would – or wanted to — end up. I eventually landed in a good place, and then left it to start a new adventure.
Starting a yoga practice is another way I’ve found my place by following my own curiosities and doing my own thing. I didn’t know much about it when I went to my first class. None of my close friends or family practiced when I started. I thought “doing yoga” would supplement my meditation practice. And now I’m practicing, teaching, and writing about it regularly. About a year after I received my certification a friend asked me if I would teach at a middle school. I said yes because I’ve often thought that if I’d had yoga as a teen, and really developed a practice like the one I have now, I would’ve had a place to put all that teen angst. Not get rid of it, but a place – meditation, a moving practice, stillness — to deal with it, like I deal with the adult angst I have now.
As I think about the theme of this issue and read what our young contributors have to say and the answers our sisters provided, I am glad that seventeen-year-old me laid the foundation, albeit sometimes rocky, for me to run my own little place in the world.
