One, Two.

The woman on the mat next to me in yoga class yesterday had only one leg. For all the poses that absolutely required two legs, which is, er, most of them, she used a chair where her other leg would be. My eyeballs are still somewhat tilted toward the right corners of their sockets from staring but trying not to be obvious. It hit me suddenly how pathetic all my excuses for skipping class have been: tired, hungry, traffic going there, traffic coming back, it's too rainy, it's too sunny, it's too windy, it's too calm. I mean, really. I suck. Resolution #2 for 2009: cut out excuses and just accept my own suckiness when it's the only glaring truth.

Right before yoga class, I re-read my favorite book of all time while having my car washed. On the title page, there is a quote:

"We know the sound of two hands clapping. But what is the sound of one hand clapping?"
- a Zen koan

I'm not very Zen. And I don't even know what a koan is. I never thought about what this quote means until then. My personal theory is that, basically, it takes two to make a sound. If you say something, and no one heard you speak, have you really spoken? If you live your whole life, but have no witness, have you really lived?

While driving from the car wash to yoga, it suddenly occurred to me that when I was in high school, before I even knew who Salinger is, I'd seen this book before. My boyfriend back then had gone into a bookstore while we were at our local mall to pick it up. My attitude at the time was something like, "Yeah, ok, whatever." But for some reason, I remembered the title, Nine Stories. It was years later, bored to death living in a secluded villa in Florence, that I picked up the book in an Italian bookstore to pass the time. It immediately became my favorite book of all time, and nothing I read since can even come close. But I never even made the slightest connection until now. If not for that bookstore in that shopping mall more than ten years ago, would I ever have picked up this book? Some people keep coming back into my life in ways they don't even know.