A Flexible New Year’s Resolution

The evergreen pursuit of one more year alive while living in the long shadow of yoga

For the last too many years (my wife is probably keeping count), I have made the New Year’s resolution to begin doing yoga. It has yet to materialize into much beyond a B-list ambition. As the dream of increased or better-toned musculature has fallen by the wayside, the more rational goal of flexibility has taken its place as a front-runner for physical fitness.

For me, flexibility shouldn’t be that hard. I was a childhood gymnast, once pliable in ways I can only now laugh at (though the splits were always more of a grimace than any kind of lithe descent). But an early growth spurt put an end to dreams of Olympic gold when a stress fracture ended my career. My flexibility quickly did a one-eighty, changing allegiances from necessity to anathema. Ever since I have been stiff as a board.

Proof of pliability.

But in life and in health, being stiff as a board is a detractor. With the exception of being a genius or visionary (a true stretch), at parties, working in open-air office spaces, and in the greater preservation of your bodily health—flexibility is seen as a worthwhile pursuit. The ability to more easily mold oneself into shapes better fitting for life is a (arguably) good thing. And after the snapping of my Achilles tendon in the first minute of a pickup basketball game, potentially due to the rigidity of my calf muscle, I once again made a vow to become more bendy.

This has amounted to twenty minutes of living room stretching before I go for a run or join in adult recreational sports. I still have never gone to a yoga class.

The resistance likely stems from my natural aversion to class based exercise, it being both a financial disinclination and a stubborn belief that adolescent sports have given me the necessary knowledge to maintain my body correctly. I have been yelled at enough to run faster, try harder, get better— I should be able to do it myself.

Exercise is repetition. Sets, reps, intervals. In the exercise of life, a year becomes the de facto marker. It’s how we count our existence, those clumpings of three-sixty-five allotting a vague attribution of knowledge and maturity that serve as legal on ramps for drivers licenses, alcohol consumption, or this year—my ability to finally run for president.

See also for increased waist size, generic brand brain fog, and most frustrating to me, one-size-too-big clumsiness. With each year, I find myself increasingly running into things and hitting my hands on shelves when putting dishes away, a humiliation I am forced to swallow and then blame on neuropathy or some cancer-caused scapegoat.

Cancer consumes your calendar. It adheres to the rule of repetition, though with enough of it, it hopefully leads to a lack thereof. It overruns your twenty-four hours, your seven days, your fifty-two weeks. Diagnosis date (when it all changed), end of treatment (when it finally ended), achievement of remission (when it felt over), they devour the months.

It intertwines strange and painful memories amidst normally ebullient ones, lying in wait between birthdays and anniversaries, those confectionery-laden events that celebrate a more proper passage of time.

Anniversaries of pain and loss demand their own flexibility. People and things disappearing become strange additions to your weeks. The reminder that a random Thursday was the third anniversary of my first relapse top lines my calendar, the yellow block of text immediately followed by a meeting, a phone call, and a reminder to renew a library book. The haunting of difficult reminders is dispelled by the banal trappings of life, three bullet points of obligation that maybe I should be celebrating because I can.

Some months later, on a weekend, when I think I should have nothing on my calendar, I casually flick to the app and am surprised by a dot. Tapping, I am reminded that it is the second anniversary of my CAR-T cell infusion, a monotonous blinking realization that my life had restarted yet again, this time on a Saturday and I had planned nothing. The only sweet treat we had in the apartment were some slightly brown bananas. I make a note to go get something to share with Emily when she gets back from work but then the thought is lost, a momentous occasion of another year alive wiped away by a funny video about hot dogs sent by a childhood friend who now lives in Colorado. 

My birthday is January 1^st.  It is an on-the-nose reminder that for every calendar year that goes by, I am one year older. For most of my years, I have not been a big resolution maker. As told, I am not very good at sticking to them. I initially resolved after my first diagnosis to make a big moment of what they call your “second birthday”, which is the day you get your transplant.

It was April 24^th and I would have gotten three big celebrations out of it—until the relapse. Then we would’ve moved that big day to November 30^th and we could have looped in my cousin, who was my wonderful haplo donor. We could’ve really gone for it. Balloons and all. But then that would have had to change to June 15^th, when the resolution to remain cancer-free was broken yet again.

Every resolution is a bet against time. That should enough of it pass, whether it be calendar days or seconds on this Earth, I resolve to change something, supposedly, for the rest of the time I have left.

But the accumulation of time indebts an accumulation of stuff. More job, more money, more skinny, less fat, less screens, more presence, less sugar sub for more leafy greens. In some way shape or form, every year we begin by attempting (or pretending) to add something to our lives (oftentimes by subtracting something else).

The weight of it can be daunting. The conceit feels bloated. How many resolutions should a thirty-five year old have? At what age did my parents introduce the concept? Are we really expected to add a new badge or personality hat each year? Won’t we look ridiculous? Is the betterment process infinite? Or is a smile and the crowd-tested, zen-like admittance to still being a work-in-progress enough to beat back the creeping worry of being another unfinished project when our mortal deadline finally arrives? Will I be put in my grave with seventy unfinished hats? Will this substack be one of them?

In truth, everyone has a bit of a wink-wink relationship with resolutions. I’m over blowing it. No one expects to hold on to each resolution with grim finality. In a given year, if I would have gone to yoga for half of it I would have considered it a resounding success.

Accomplishments ring eternal and defeats are either swept under the rug, rebranded, or pushed deep down, bottled, and sold as kombucha. No one can grasp the entirety of their life. But because we can feel the annual slipping of time through our fingers—a resolution is a nice lob of self-assurance that we hopefully did (and do) something good with it.

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In the mirror, I count the additional creases and millimeters of my hairline that have evaporated over the years. I see the interpolated nodes on my face, as if some visual effects artist has made a 3D rendering and is tugging and stretching the mapping of who I am. On the worst days, the smiling mask of comedy threatens to wither into the drooping frown of drama. But I enjoy a good genre bend and resolve to exist in between.

Melancholy, the holiday’s scent-less, lingering odor, has been a strange yet beguiling accompaniment to the raising of champagne glasses. In youth, my birthday has been celebrated proudly, with the slow wind up of “happy birthday” crescendoing minutes after the clock struck midnight. Afterwards, the quiet, national holiday desolation of a world reborn but comatose felt like a fun payoff to the energy expended to launch ourselves once more around the sun.

Now, time creeps inward, bittersweet and potent, the sugar in the reduction dripping its molasses concentration directly into my veins. Here we are again, wide eyed, wonderfully, terribly, incredibly, requisitely, straight through, no skips.

But here I have to stop myself from another run on sentence about melancholy. Because this year, under the New Year’s guise of going over to my brother’s place to play a card game based around the bartering and trading of various beans (very cool), I was instead greeted with a gaggle of friends surprising me for my birthday.

It was an electric shock of good vibes. My older brother and wife jolted any melancholy right out of me. If the promise of another year sometimes feels like the part in a football game where there’s a break and someone squirts water in your mouth through your helmet before you go back in and get run over… This felt like maybe I didn’t have to play football anymore. Which was great because I don’t really like football.

What a fragile thing, the brain. For all my hardheadedness and growing proficiency in gallows humor, I want to be more open and honest. If this substack is an exercise in exorcising demons, then we may as well start with mental health.

In some ways, better mental health can feel like the “go to yoga” resolutions of years past. A yoga studio is a thing that I know exists, and I can walk by and see the people arching towards the sky as proof of concept, but even with the promise of greener pastures—fear of failure or indulgence in complacency has been enough to dissuade me. Perhaps I should resolve to become a more persuasive person.

It is here that I return to my inflexibility, and my desire to cure it. Because sometimes I wonder if I actually want to cure it. If I did, I feel like I should have done it by now.

There is a holistic idea of flexibility as a sort of origami, with every crease and fold an eventual swan payoff. To be less resistant is cool and helpful in that you are less prone to injury and contain the ability to “go with the flow”. But being able to roll with the punches easily shakes off the fact that you are still getting punched.

So against the realities of sickness, against the grace that I am told I should grant myself; is a quest for further flexibility a demand for a body that I will never have? Is the pursuit of something purposely fallible a tell that it is perhaps unnecessary? (Mostly in the metaphorical sense, I definitely need to be able to more consistently touch my toes)

Anyone with cancer has bent to the whims of this life, contorting themselves into shapes unimaginable, all in the pursuit of becoming a human form that would carry them into another year. And cancer isn’t even the worst of what some people deal with. Here it is placeholder, a curveball of life demanding painful adaptation.

It also makes for an easy resolution. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t initially resolved to beat cancer. Unfortunately it makes for a more difficult adversary. It is its own year in miniature; wholly unpredictable, wreathed in banal and cosmic challenge, punctuated with fits of strange joy and loss, and should you make it through—a new life event that looks like an odd duck on the timeline of your life.

It can, will, should, or might change your life. 

Against my will, the flexibility has been seeping into my bones for ten years now. The prophecy has come true and without ever having to be coaxed into downward dog.

I would be a liar if I didn’t admit that cancer has made me more flexible, despite my resistance to it. For many years there was no better defeat than to pretend as if it had never happened.

But I have allowed myself to become more ok with how my life has turned out (flexibility of expectations). And while it sounds like defeat, in some ways it feels like finding that bit of solace was going to be a necessary life lesson acquired somewhere down the road, cancer or not. And put that way—cancer can feel like a reluctant cheat code.

So maybe I can finally give up on manufactured betterment, though Emily is probably right about me being more diligent about my cholesterol. Instead, this years New Year’s resolution will fit the bill in that, much like any resolution, it can be made every year. And whether in success or failure, its pursuit remains evergreen.

Here I will commit to the secret, thrumming affirmation I have held as interior monologue for the last ten years, a hopeful missive I have performed like a child in the backseat, mouthing silently along to a song on the radio. I am good on yoga, I would simply like to keep on living. I think it would be great if we all did. And while it may seem akin to wasting one of a genie’s three wishes, I am still happy to make it—because sometimes it doesn’t hurt to say the obvious out loud.

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