97 and the metal staircase

She was ninety-seven when she climbed the spiral staircase.

It led to the yoga room on the second floor of my studio in Copenhagen.

The staircase was metal, narrow and surprisingly steep. Each step landed with a small metallic bang. Sometimes people had to wait at the top or bottom while someone else passed.

There was a handrail covered in black rubber.

When she reached the top, she was smiling.

She lived in the neighbourhood, she announced.

She had never tried yoga before.

But now that yoga had arrived almost at her doorstep, she thought she probably should.

She didn’t look like someone arriving for a yoga class.
She looked like someone who had decided to see what happened.

Her eyes seemed to smile before the rest of her did.

○

Many of us in the room had been practising for years.

We had methods. Sequences. Ideas about alignment, breathing, discipline, awareness, progress. Things to work on.

We were deeply concerned with hamstrings.
Some of us were also concerned with consciousness.
Occasionally both before breakfast.

She seemed concerned with none of this.
She simply joined in.

For an hour she moved through whatever she could move through, apparently without needing to decide whether she was good at it.

She smiled a lot.

There was no visible project.

No attempt to become more flexible.
No need to understand what yoga was supposed to reveal.
No particular interest in arriving anywhere.

○

At the time, many of us had somehow come to believe that repeating improbable shapes while breathing through the nose was, if not the answer to everything, at least unusually close.

We knew how many breaths to take.
We knew where the foot should go.
We had theories about tight muscles and monkey minds.

We knew that eventually, with enough discipline — and perhaps slightly more balanced hamstrings — something important might happen.

Then a ninety-seven-year-old woman climbed the metal staircase, borrowed a mat and smiled through her first yoga class.

○

At the end, she thanked me.
She said she felt good.

I believed her.

Although I also had the strange impression that she probably felt good before she came in.

She gave me a warm hug.

Her eyes were still smiling.

Then she walked back toward the staircase.

○

Years later, what I remember most is not what she could or couldn't do.
Honestly, I have no idea, not even then.

I mostly remember how little seemed to be in the way.

She had no history with yoga to defend.
No practice to compare with yesterday's.
No idea of whether she was advancing.
Nothing to prove to the room.

She had come because she had never done it before.

Then she did it.

Then she went home.

There was something almost offensively complete about that.

○

I don't know what she understood.
Probably nothing in the way we used the word understanding.

We had methods.
She had lightness.

We had questions about consciousness.
She had climbed the stairs.

We were trying to make impressive shapes.
She left an impression.

I never saw her again.

But somehow I still can.

The warm hug.
The eyes that smiled.

And then the sound of someone making her way back down the metal stairs.