when i stopped going

I stopped for eleven months in my thirty-sixth year. There was no good reason, which is, I think, the most common reason.

The first month I told myself I was tired. The second month I told myself I would start again on a Monday. The third month I stopped telling myself anything, because the story had become embarrassing, and silence is cheaper than a fresh excuse every week.

I expected, when I eventually came back, that there would be a reckoning. I would step onto the mat and something would be waiting to greet me, either kindly or not. I had rehearsed both versions. In the kind version, the mat would be a forgiving friend, and I would cry a little, and something would be restored. In the unkind version, the mat would be a mirror, and I would have to look at myself, and it would be hard, and I would be better for it afterward.

What actually happened was neither. I stepped onto the mat. I did two shapes I have done for years. Nothing was waiting. The mat was not a friend or a mirror. It was, and continues to be, a rectangle of rubber on a wooden floor.

This was, in the end, the most useful thing the return could have done. The practice did not ask me to explain myself. It did not welcome me back, because it had not noticed I was gone. It had kept doing, in my absence, whatever it does, which is to say it had not been doing anything at all. The practice is not a being. It is something the body does when the body is available. I had not been available. Now I was.

If you are thinking about coming back to something after a long time, I offer you this: the thing is not going to perform a reunion with you. It will not ask where you have been. You will step back into it, and nothing will happen for a minute, and then, if you are lucky, something small will happen, and it will be unrelated to the eleven months. The eleven months were not a test. They were just a fact. The thing the practice has for you is happening now.