balance

so i like to do yoga. i think it's good for me. i understand why a lot of southeast asian religions consider it a major part of sacred worship. for me it's more of a method of self mastery and improvement. there is no competition with anyone more than myself. (i tend to back out of competition and almost voluntarily lose because losing is then my choice and not forced upon me. competing with myself? there's no competition, only improvement.) right. there is a point to this i promise. monday night. i went snow shoeing. it was amazing. we left the parking lot about 7:30-well after dark. we had head lamps so we were good to go. we hiked about 25 minutes and we decided to turn off the head lamps. there was supposed to be moon light. i'm sure that if we had hiked longer we would have actually seen it, but hiked into a bowl and were pretty surrounded by mountains. turning off the lamps was kind of empowering. rather than focusing on the the snow 2 feet ahead of us, we were able to focus on the trees, rocks, saddles, landmarks around us. [insert really poor transition] during my undergrad senior capstone class, we wrote about our experience with the english department. one woman wrote a paper that has never left me. she talked about "disabling to enable". you know the concept, taking out contacts so that you can't see the really big crowd while speaking in public. the concept has been floating around my brain for the past 7 years. [transition back]as we wandered around in the dark, i felt like i was more aware of my surroundings. i couldn't see very well, but i was more secure with my feet. even though i didn't have ski poles, i didn't have a problem trekking through the powder. the thing that boggles my mind is that while i'm doing yoga in the dark on a hard flat surface, i have a hard time with my balance. i have to create myself a focal point or else will manage to land on the person next to me. i had absolutely no problem in the snow. it made me think about complexities of the human body and it's innate need to compensate for it's own flaws. the deaf rely more on sight. the blind have incredible hearing. even though i couldn't see my balance was more in tune than normal. i guess it was one of those 'a ha!' moments that was desperately needed in my life.