Learning to Appreciate Everything That Comes “In-Between”

There are those rare moments in life where you achieve complete and total clarity. Where you finally get it, whatever it is. Where you know your place in your little corner of the universe. Where all of a sudden there is this energy pulsing through your body and you understand how you and the squirrel that lives under the porch and chews on all of the electric cables are both just children of the cosmos, gently cradled in the bosom of a higher power. There are these types of moments … and then there is everything else in-between. This is a story that happens in the in-between.

I am at the end of my junior year of college. It’s a not-a-girl-but-not-yet-a-woman type of scenario. I am no longer the doe-eyed freshman of ’11 but I am not yet the cynical senior of ’15. I am the in-between.

Being a college junior, I had a pretty heavy course load. I was finishing off the last of my upper-division classes for my major. With one unit left to fill I decided to take a “fun” class, I decided to take Intro to Yoga. Figuring it would be an easy ‘A,’ I bypassed the opportunity to audit the class and also decided against the pass/fail option. I thought to myself: “Hey Mia, it’s me…Mia. Anyways, This class is one unit, It’ll be a joke. You’ll align some chakras, you’ll re-route your dogs so they’ll face in a downward direction and you’ll be good to go.”

It may helpful to note that what follows is an example of my average inter-cranial thought process: “Mia, these corduroy overalls are not a thing you should wear on a first date. No, these corduroy overalls are the only thing you should wear on a first date.” As the girl that regularly convinces herself of things like the aforementioned, I should not be listening to myself. Unfortunately, I am very persuasive.

I took the class, for no other reason other than it was there. It was sitting in front of me and I grabbed it. In the end, this little lady ended up with some metaphysical egg on her face.

The class was at 9am twice a week. I didn’t think that this early time was going to be any issue because I can wake up with the best of ‘em—in this instance the best of ‘em being 80-year-olds and dockworkers. But I found myself skipping class a lot because I had stayed up late the night before writing papers for classes I deemed “more important.” The class also had a final and a midterm, but I didn’t think those would be hard because it seemed to me like all the poses were named either after geographical features or small mammals — like mountains and muskrats. But the final had a lot to do with Sanskrit, so my yoga final caused me more stress than any other test I had to take. (The irony of this statement is not lost on the author.)

To make a semester-long story short, I ended up with a B- in the class.

I am one of those kids that care about grades. So when I saw that B- in an introductory physical education class, I entered into child’s pose and had the temper tantrum to accompany. Would this affect my GPA? Would grad schools look at this? What does this say about my spiritual well-being? I finally had an excuse to wear my yoga pants, what now?

Getting a B- in an Intro to Yoga class is an in-between. I foolishly misjudged something and I recognize that I was wrong. After coming to this realization, I didn’t have some great moment of cosmic understanding and, conversely, I didn’t indulge in any sort of incensed ignorance. I had a reaction somewhere in-between. I figured that I will graduate college and my lowest grade will probably be in Intro to Yoga. And that’s some funny shit.

The days before you go on vacation and you are running around trying to find travel size Q-tips—that is the in-between. Waiting to hear back about a job application is the in-between. College — that time between parental reliance and paying your own phone bill — is just one really giant in-between.

Those moments of clarity that I mentioned earlier, those suckers are fleeting. Like tears in the rain or mid-season sitcoms on NBC. The in-betweens, that’s the stuff that stays with you. It’s where you make friends. It’s where you lose friends. It’s where you find your favorite bar. It’s where you forget your sixth-month anniversary, ’cause who really remember that anyways. It’s where you have that month when you don’t eat gluten. It’s where you settle on wedding invitations that neither of you really liked all that much. It’s where you get a B- in an introductory yoga and it’s where you get over it.

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