As a small child, I regarded my father as the Yoga poses names and pictures doer because he was off doing working to provide for all of us. While my father Yoga poses names and pictures was away working, my mother cared for us, looking after our needs, being there for us to nurture and instill a sense of stability. Looking back, I can now see their partnership as the combination relationship required to create this balance; but for a long time, all I wanted was to be more like him and less like her. I don’t think that this choice had as much to do with my parents and who they were as people per se, but was more likely tied to their designated roles within our family and maybe even to their comfort levels within those roles that influenced my decisions early on in how I would live my life.
The result of that early choice is a life that has thus far been largely spent doing, and far too little of it just being. When I was younger, the two roles seemed to contradict each other because they were dichotomized into responsibilities, as opposed to showing two people with different natures integrated into one role with many responsibilities and reinforcement for us, their pupils. In retrospect, I would say that my twenties were spent establishing a path for myself that was to be acknowledged by others, albeit slightly out of order, since work came before school we usu-, ally believe, sometimes falsely, that the degree must precede the recognition. Years later, I am spending my early thirties in catch-up mode, because of my late start.
