When I finished business school, I started looking for a job. Maybe more accurately, I was looking for a purpose and my passion and good work to do, but the first step was finding a job. I spent a lot of time thinking about my resume and the collection of experiences it captured. Studying and teaching math. Wrangling the finances of a start-up law firm. Volunteer gigs to support homeless women, active duty military and recently resettled refugees. Interning at a local theater and a Brazilian small-business incubator.
I can explain the motivations behind getting involved with each, but sometimes I struggle to put the pieces together into a coherent narrative. I know that each represents something I care about, something I value, but sometimes they seem very disparate. Outside of a job interview, I don’t think I really need to be able to explain my resume to anyone. I usually take a lot of joy from the varied experiences that show up on it. But I have also found that delving into the relationships between seemingly unrelated activities can lead to some interesting insights.
One recent interest that doesn’t show up on my resume is my newfound love of yoga. When I started my 9-5 desk job, I also started going to occasional classes, initially to fight off the combined physical stresses of running and sitting at a desk all day. Then I met an awesome teacher who welcomed me into a fantastic community of yoga people and I got totally hooked. But that could be a whole other blog post.
My usual Saturday morning teacher was out today, but left us with a wonderful sub. In the middle of class, I noticed how much she was using the word “beautiful,” which is not uncommon for a yoga teacher. What occurred to me this morning, though, was that the last time I had gotten hooked on something because of how much my teachers use the word “beautiful,” it was math. When I started taking calculus in college, I couldn’t get over how frequently ideas, theorems, relationships were described as “beautiful” or “elegant.” The words came up way more than in any other subject. It was captivating.
I never would have thought that math and yoga have much in common. One is all about thinking, while the other is about clearing thoughts from your mind. But I think I love them both for many of the same reasons. I remember leaving my early abstract math classes feeling like my brain had actually been stretched. It took such new and different ways of thinking to wrap my mind around some of the ideas that it actually felt like mental exercise. I don’t use most of what I learned studying math in my day to day life anymore, but it definitely changed the way I think, permanently, for the better. I ended up with a stronger, more limber brain. And I still think that that limits are beautiful and Georg Cantor created theorems and proofs more elegant than an evening gown.
I have yet to come across another mental activity that compares to first learning math, but now yoga is doing the same thing for my body. I end class feeling stretched and changed. I am tapping into muscles I didn’t know existed, building strength and flexibility. The beautiful thing about yoga is that the effects carry over to my mind, also. It is hard to say that studying math had any physical effects – other than a stiff neck from leaning over a desk for too long or a sore back from carrying my books around – but yoga is helping me build patience and mental calm as much as it is improving my posture and balance or taking the pain out of my hips.
But what does any of this have to do with my resume? Just a realization that sometimes things that seem totally unrelated on the surface are actually deeply connected. In this case, I get the same rush from beginning to grasp arm balances as I did from first understanding that some kinds of infinity are bigger than others. Both make me feel stronger, more limber, and better able to take on other challenges. Both are the same kind of beautiful.
