Dylan Assignment

Times always change. They really do. And you have to always be ready for something that's coming along and you never expected it. - Bob Dylan, MusiCares Speech

 

One of the things that brings us to back to our mats over and over is the difficulty we have with change. Everything might be going along just fine and suddenly:  The pipes burst. A loved one falls ill. You lose your job. Your once sweet and pliable child becomes a surly teenager.

 

Things change. And it's hard not to want to hold on to a time when things seemed - at least in our memories - to have been simpler, easier; better.

 

One of the first Dylan songs to influence me was "The Times They Are a'Changing." I was about 14 at the time. It was the 1970's and practically everyone I knew played guitar, and everyone was singing Dylan. A friend of mine taught me the song, and I was blown away by how wise the lyrics were. That last verse:

 

The line it is drawn

The curse it is cast

The slow one now

Will later be fast

As the present now

Will later be past

The order is

Rapidly fadin'

And the first one now

Will later be last

For the times they are a-changin'.

 

seemed almost Biblical, or Shakespearean. I find it interesting that Dylan referenced Shakespeare right in the beginning of his MusiCares speech, but it seems natural. Long before I read Hamlet I knew the lyrics to dozens of Dylan songs. And in so many ways they're both dealing with the same, big, insistent questions: what is a human life? Its essence, its nature, its details? What is love? What is time?

 

That afternoon, learning to play that song, was the first time I ever thought about the fact that life is in constant flux, that change is actually a way of identifying and defining life. The moment an organism stops changing, it dies.

 

Yoga keeps us connected to that flow. With each breath, we feel the body change: inhale, and the chest and belly rise, oxygen rushes to our cells, we feel our muscles energize; exhale, the leftovers leave our cells, we turn inwards for a moment, we repose. In the next inhale, we're already different than we were during the previous one. It's so incredible and constant, and it mostly happens without our awareness. But when we turn our attention towards that miraculous wave of life coming in, going out, the body changing, the mind changing, then we get to experience the beauty of that process. And the process of change becomes a powerful teacher. Our asana gets stronger because we don't get so rigid in the fluctuations, but allow the rise and swell to take us towards new edges of our physical experience. Our sense of life likewise gets stronger, as we feel more free to abandon our stakehold in the past and more forward into places we could never have imagined. And so life unfolds and we can observe and celebrate the changes rather than cling like frightened children to the shore, the remnants of our past.