Ardor Versus Austerity

One of my yoga teachers used to talk about the dual nature of ardor or passion. The flip side of ardor, according to Kim, was austerity.

I think about this all the time.

There is a young guy who runs past our house every day. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that he runs past our house multiple times a day. This dude is always running. In every kind of weather, every hour of the day. That’s ardor. Passion. Deep commitment.

I am quick to label my runner friend’s behavior extreme and intense, but then I remember this:

Once I was practicing—just a typical, unremarkable day of practice—when I overheard two electricians outside my window talking. “Man alive, that woman sure does play the piano a long time.”

A person living in a glass house should not throw rocks. I get ardor. It’s the austerity that I struggle with.

Because what Kim was saying is that real ardor comes with austerity. If you are going to run all day, or practice the piano for hours, there are other things that you are not going to do. Passion means sacrifice: you choose this over that. True commitment whittles down your life to its core, narrows your focus, simplifies your decisions. It is minimalism crossed with practice, the spare monastery embedded inside the brilliant stained-glass cathedral. I find this idea breathtakingly beautiful.

And not simple at all.  

Now that the days are longer and the sun rises earlier, early morning trips to the Zendo for meditation sits have become one piece of what I call my five-part triathlon: 1. Bike to the Zendo 2. Sit Zazen 3. Bike to the pool 4. Swim 30-minutes 5. Bike home.

It is unclear whether I have simplified my meditation/exercise routines or unnecessarily complicated them.

But just this morning I was sitting in Zazen, trying to slow down my racing thoughts. I had woken up thinking about a situation in the studio I needed to deal with, which in my early morning dreams had taken the form of a Nazi official questioning me as I was traveling from Vienna to Paris (not that difficult parents resemble Nazis, but…). 

While I was mentally arguing my case with the difficult parent in the studio, around me sat my fellow meditators, many of whom are there every single morning, holding space, following their breaths. Clearly, by their very presence every day, they are practicing ardor and austerity. I suspect none of them were trying to turn this practice into a crazy-making five-part triathlon. Or debating Nazis in their minds.

I wonder what austerity might look like in a full, complicated life, chockablock with interests and passions, excuses and distractions. It’s the chockablock part that gives me pause, and all the ways we complicate our own intentions.

Case in point: My recent semester break wasn’t just happily busy, it was ridiculously stuffed. Both Matt and I had concerts with hours of rehearsals. There was a wedding to attend. We hosted out-of-town musicians, threw two dinner parties and an end-of-choir-season celebration. I tackled piles of paperwork, worked in the garden, saw friends.

In addition, there was 48-hours in Santa Fe, carved out of the work madness. Those precious two days are the only vacation we are going to manage this summer, but Santa Fe was magical. It was bustling with tourists, fun and festive. We stayed in a casita off Canyon Road and walked everywhere. I spent my summer wardrobe allowance on linen. We drank margaritas every night and saw a movie (“The Sheep Detectives.” Charming!). It even rained. The whole thing felt indulgent, really.

Which is why, perhaps, I find myself pondering the two-sided ardor/austerity coin these days. There is so much to love as a beautiful New Mexico spring slides into summer: The delightfully cool mornings and evenings. Saturday mornings at the farmer’s market. A refrigerator full of berries. Linen. Dinners in the courtyard. Sun tea and chilled white wine.

And there is also the austerity demanded by a life built on practice: The hours on the piano bench. The single-minded attention. The deep listening and the willingness to grow and change and bend. The exhaustion and the exhilaration. The commitment to doing one thing at a time. All the practice boxes.

Once again, the answer may lie in the practice boxes, those little squares of accountability and honesty, the evidence of both ardor and austerity, discipline and determination. Just this week a student was whining about the difficulty of some assignment. I looked at her practice chart. She had practiced twice since her last lesson. I could not hide my annoyance. “Kid, this might be hard, yes. But until you’ve put in the work, who knows? You practice and then we’ll talk.”

As the heat rises, the days lengthen, and our rhythms and practices shift with the season, I find myself shedding the extras, the unnecessary, the superfluous, sifting through the debris of my days and habits, trying to tease out the bare bones of practice beneath the clutter of my own making. The next two months spool out before me, the empty practice boxes just waiting to be filled.