Yoga and My Decrepitude.

So for a few years now I’ve had a little to a lot of back pain on evenings after I do laundry or vacuum the apartment and sometimes just randomly when I haven’t done anything strenuous at all. Usually it’s not that bad, but sometimes I’m flat on my back for the rest of the day.

I got out of my gym habit during the pandemic, so I get very little exercise these days except hard New York walking, which is not nothing—I try to walk most places if I can get there in less than about 40 minutes, and even if I take the train I have a 15-20 minute walk to the closest station—but stomping on the pavement is probably not good for my back. Besides the back issue, in general, I can feel my body stiffening. I’ll be 63 in a couple weeks.

Seemed like yoga might be what I need, I kept saying, what I need is core strength and more flexibility, but I put it off and put it off for months, mostly out of social anxiety: going to a new place with new people, starting a new thing with new stuff to learn, feeling dumb, out of my element... The community center in my neighborhood where I go, or used to go, to the gym has a yoga class twice a week. I love this community center, so I finally dragged my ass there (at 7:30 a.m., thank you).

And I started to really enjoy it. I like the teacher, the other people seem nice, the vibe is quiet and mellow, there’s not a lot of socializing. And then the dance studio across the street started offering a class twice a week (at the more reasonable time of 9 a.m), so I tried that one this week and liked it even more.

Since twice a week didn’t feel like quite enough if I want to develop some discipline, I thought I might do both. The community center class is on Mondays and Thursdays at 7:30 and the dance studio class is on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 9, so on Thursdays I’d take 2 classes in a row, but they’re both close to home and it it felt totally doable. Today was the first day I was going to try it out and see if it was too much.

After the 7:30 class, though, as soon as I started walking, my back started to hurt. When I got home I was in pain, I lay down for a while and felt better, but as soon as I tried to get up it was worse. As long as I’m completely immobile (except for my fingers) it’s tolerable, but any movement is pretty painful.

I’m reminded of my favorite Lily Tomlin joke: “The other day I bought a wastebasket, and I brought it home in a paper bag. And when I got home, I put the paper bag in the wastebasket.”