Last night, over Champagne (don’t be alarmed by the picture, there were other people present to aid in consumption!), my business partner, Lies Sapp (at right), and I bought the Carrboro Yoga Company from my longtime friends, Rick and Donia Robinson (Donia’s at left, and will be familiar to my Kripalu students as my most lovely assistant). But did the transfer happen last night, with the signing of the closing papers, or did it happen when we came to terms? Did it happen when Lies and I formed a partnership, or will it happen when our training is finished and Donia leaves for California?
Similarly, last week, I signed another important contract, for a new book deal. The actual signing took place in a sixty-second trip to my agent’s office, between picking up cookies at the co-op for snack and running to meet my children at the door to their school. That was not the moment when I formally began writing this book. Was that moment when the concept came to me? When I drafted a table of contents and sketched out the direction I wanted to go with the book? When my editor and I began talking? When I opened the first chapter file?
Does your “doing” a race—your first half marathon, say—happen when you cross the finish line? The start line? When you think, “I can do this”? When you pay for your race entry? Or does it happen all along the way, every morning as you lace up your shoes, every evening as you head to yoga class?
Yoga practice teaches us to emphasize the process over the result, because the result is always changing. Any process is a linked series of moments, and while there are key moments along the path, none is the definitive one. The more you can stay aware in each, the more fulfilling your life.