Inevitable

This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Worlds. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.

A big, unexpected milestone this week: I jumped back from a standing forward fold to chaturanga dandasana, or low plank. That’s a staple of yoga practice, but one that my broken wrist in March made impossible, because it requires briefly bearing the weight of the whole body on wrists extended to 90 degrees.

The task I've given myself since my bike crash last year is to keep working within my constraints, not assuming they were permanent and also not conditioning my work on the expectation that they would ever yield. I got in the pool to swim last spring the second the surgeon said I could, working within the constraints, and that gave me a base of strength from which to make a targeted return to weight-lifting. I spent endless hours on a bike in preparation for the Ironman, which was excruciating for my wrist but useful in that it helped me understand the post-surgical topology, to distinguish pain from harm.

And then I went back to yoga class, modifying many sequences to avoid the wrist completely at first, then carefully probing its limits. As recently as last month, it was unclear if the fire that kindled around the injury site every time I tested it would ever die down. I prepared for it not to.

"Enlightenment is absolute cooperation with the inevitable." That quote is attributed to the Indian Jesuit priest Anthony de Mello. Cooperate is a very different word from concede or accept, because—although it may sometimes connote otherwise—it preserves a role for agency. To cooperate is to move in tandem, and to move in tandem is to affect.

Confrontation has its moments. All of us, for example, will have to confront the anti-human tidal forces that are on preview in Elon Musk’s pubescent vandalism of the American commonwealth. If you currently think he’s on your side, prepare to navigate betrayal.

But that impending confrontation is cooperation with the inevitable. It’s inevitable that people will be free, because we don’t have to see exactly how in order to keep working at it. The constraints don’t matter, the work does. Our ingenuity is endless. We will create the place where we will live.

Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com.