it can’t all be tied up in a bow.

Recently I experienced the enigmatic thing of “closure.” 

It was three and a half years in the making. After a while I had concluded that any closure that would happen there would need to happen within myself. And I had accepted that.

But by some miracle, real life closure actually happened.
A conversation that seemed to tie up any loose ends.
An energy exchange that left me feeling satisfied and complete within myself, not wanting anything more or less.

Closure…wow. I actually did it. Is this adulthood?

Sure enough, a couple months later, that box was…sort of “opened” again.

Now, however it ends will most likely not be so neat and tidy.
My logical brain would say I should have just let things be nice and neat as they were left several months back.
But the bigger, more emotional side of me knows it’s not that simple.

And the other thing is,

I'm absolutely terrible at compartmentalizing. 

Some people (most, from my perspective) have the skill, or even the reflex, to put parts of themselves in different categories. 

This feeling goes here, this memory goes there, this person lives here and that person lives there. 


I do not have such a reflex, or skill. 

When one door is opened in my heart, all the floodgates are open.

One memory triggers another, one feeling attaches itself to some moment in my past that are seemingly unrelated. 

But my heart, and my all-over-the-place mind, feel that everything is related. I connect the dots like it’s my job. It may be my number one talent, to make all these different parts of me and my past, exist together as one. 

I somehow successfully closed a box, a compartment of my life. Tied it up in a nice, neat bow...
and I opened it again.

And now, I find myself sitting with all sorts of emotions, regrets, memories, insights, realizations about myself, questions…

And it’s all so much.

I spoke to one of my girlfriends about it all, over one of our favorite activities: smoking a little weed on facetime together and talking shit about life. She said to me,

“You’re such a feeling thing.”

I groaned back to her, “It’s too much.”

But she reflected back to me, “It seems though, that you’re somehow made for all this extra-ness. All this feeling. You have room for it all.”

---

All my life I've been searching for a sense of closure. On, just about anything.

I love the idea of the “happily ever after.” I don't think I've ever had a clue what that actually means, but the idea of it is soothing to me.

And in my writing, my greatest difficulty is ending things. The beginning and middle usually pour right out of me, quite effortlessly. But when I get to the end, it’s always a question of “How do I tie this up in a bow?”.  How do I make it all make sense?

How do I give this thing closure?

Relationships, heartbreaks, injustices, grief…none of these things have an ending that makes sense or feel like “closure.” I find this to be frustrating, and unfair. 

Maybe that’s why savasana is my favorite pose.
As a practitioner of yoga, but even more so as a teacher. I love offering that sense of closure to people. That feeling of, “Hey, practice may have been messy. It may have been great. It may have been a lot of different things, but whatever it was doesn’t matter anymore. It's over now. Now is the time to let it go, release, commemorate the ending of practice and begin anew.”

Maybe there’s really something to that.

Maybe there’s something to be said for taking that posture of acceptance. Cause savasana isn’t actually the end. Practice continues on. But it’s a commemoration. A moment. A container for the fullness of it all, to rest and accept, before moving through the rest of life.

And maybe, there’s more freedom in that, than what a nice, neat ending could provide. 

Maybe there’s a freedom to be found in accepting that,

it can’t all be tied up in a bow.

With joy comes sorrow, with death comes birth and rebirth. With fond memories comes the remembrance of what we no longer have. 

I'm asking myself these days, what would my life look like if I stopped longing for the happily ever after?
What would my life feel like if I accepted that there truly may never be closure, and that things may always feel open-ended?

It likely wouldn’t provide me with the sense of security I crave.
But it would probably feel like freedom.

—-

Writing this made me realize something: when I'm feeling overwhelmed, unfinished, and longing for a sense of completion or closure, I should practice savasana. 


**In case you're unfamiliar, savasana (traditionally the final pose in a yoga practice) is when you lie flat on your back, and relax your entire body. You just lay there, relax, and just be. Letting go of whatever happened before that moment, allowing yourself to be deeply present.


I'm definitely gonna try it; next time I find myself caught up in the overwhelm of all the feelings colliding together, I'm just gonna lie on the floor, practice savasana and see what shifts. 
If you end up trying it too, I'd love to hear about it.


Sending you so much love,
Carly