Namaste au Côté des Champs-Elysée

There is a picture hanging on my wall at home: it's the middle of Times Square, and a little old lady is doing a sun salutation in a sea of yoga mats. I tore it out of The New Yorker who knows how many years ago, and I've stared at it over the course of many an evening spent delaying on an essay.

Today I got to be that little old lady, except I was facing the Eiffel Tower instead of M&M's World.

I'm especially impressed with myself because last night, Saturday, was Nuit Blanche, a sleepless night of contemporary art where the whole city stays up from 7 PM to 7 AM. There were installations and performances from Le Marais to Pigalle, some of them amazing, most of them mediocre, and a few downright terrible. Such is our lot. I made it to about two before calling it quits, because I wanted at least a smattering of sleep before crawling onto the métro at 9 AM to bliss out on the Champs Mars.

It's pretty moving to be seated in a crowd of two thousand people, all of us dressed in white, holding warrior pose in the blazing Paris sun. There's something powerful to be said about gestures of solidarity, even if it goes no farther than general goodwill. I've always felt there to be something intrinsically altruistic about the practice of yoga, because when undertaken seriously it cultivates patience, self-evaluation, and, by degrees, self-understanding. In the face of massive frustration, the yoga mat is just another mirror into our own minds; it's a microcosm for any kind of human interaction. What are our relationships with other people besides a reflection of our relationship with ourselves?

Every time I don't hate myself for being unable to hold the crane position; each time I breathe in deeply instead of slamming my fist against the mat--these are small steps towards accepting my negative tendencies and then moving beyond them. It's called a 'practice' for a reason: these gestures build habits for when I meet with frustration in the big bad world outside myself and have to choose a way to respond to it. I don't buy into the idea of positive thinking having the miraculous ability to magic money into existence or bullets out of it, but I do think that any kind of solitary undertaking aimed at self-improvement is a beneficial one. When we ourselves behave better the world behaves better, just a little bit, because we're part of the world and math doesn't lie.

No matter how small, every such gesture is one less drop of anger in the world, and maybe one less drop of bloodshed. And every gesture counts.