In the New York Times last week, Jason Zinoman published a profile of Martin Short tied to the new Netflix documentary, Marty, Life Is Short. The headline was “Heading Toward The Light.” That’s the phrase that’s been rattling around in my head since I read it.
A little context, because the phrase doesn’t land without it. Short was twelve when his oldest brother died in a car accident. His mother died of cancer when he was seventeen. His father, three years later. At twenty he was the youngest of five, alone in the family house in Hamilton. In 2010 his wife Nancy died of ovarian cancer. This February his daughter Katherine died by suicide. In the piece he says, in a soft voice: “I am trying to head toward the light.”
When I first read the line, my reaction was — wait, is he telling people to go die? Because “the light” in our culture has been thoroughly colonized by near-death experience iconography. You go toward the light when you stop being here.
But of course that’s not what he means. And the clarification matters, because what he means is, I think, the most important instruction a yoga practitioner can receive.
This is not toxic positivity. This is not “look on the bright side” as a way of refusing to look at anything else. This is something much harder and much more useful. It’s the deliberate decision about where to aim your attention while fully acknowledging that the hard stuff is real and is not going anywhere.
The yoga version of this — the version I find myself coming back to in the Mysore room — is that the practice is a basket. A practitioner’s job is to make the basket large enough to hold the totality of what life puts into it. The good apples and the bad apples. You don’t pretend the bad apples aren’t there. You might pull one out so it doesn’t rot the bunch. But you are not in the business of denying what’s in the basket. You’re in the business of being able to carry it.