Je Suis Canadian in Everyday Ramblings

Have I mentioned it is raining? Man is it raining.

I managed to be out in it today and walked six miles without getting anything that mattered wet. Who knew you could operate your phone while it is wrapped in a sandwich bag? Well, finding an overhang to stand under while doing it so the cold hands don’t get wet is a continual challenge but still… learn by doing.

Thanks to my awesome sister, I have some of those special gloves that allow you to swipe your phone with them on but they are not completely reliable and it is just borderline too cold for the hands…it is more the intense bone chilling damp that is problematic…

This morning we got our new Weight Watchers materials so that was worth going out for. I like this absurdly early meeting. There is a lot of success there and the people are deeply supportive of each other.

S., who has flirted with Weight Watchers, was asking me when we met for a short check in walk afterwards, “But you are not still as involved, right?”

The truth is that to maintain a weight loss one needs to work at it. Now that Oprah owns 10% of the company one of the women at the meeting was asking how is she doing with that, you know, with her personal chef and trainer…

The thing is we can only imagine what it is like to walk in someone else’s shoes.

It is so easy to have opinions though. And think them in uncharitable ways.

There was a short article in the scroll on the New York Times site a few weeks ago about a college in Ottawa that has a department that specializes in the needs of students who, well, have special needs, disabilities and the like.

This department sponsored a yoga class that was taught without charge. The article stated that “Student leaders have pulled the mat out from 60 University of Ottawa students, ending a free on-campus yoga class over fears the teachings could be seen as a form of “cultural appropriation.”

“Jennifer Scharf, who has been offering free weekly yoga instruction to students since 2008, says she was shocked when told in September the program would be suspended, and saddened when she learned of the reasoning. Staff at the Centre for Students with Disabilities believe that “while yoga is a really great idea and accessible and great for students … there are cultural issues of implication involved in the practice,” according to an email from the centre.”

This has created a modest firestorm of response from yoga teachers. I’ve been going, whoa, wait a minute, the Indian teachers wanted yoga taught in the West because they thought it would help the Independence Movement, which it did!

My own teacher Olga linked out to some articles about this very minor controversy. One studio owner in California writes…

“It doesn’t mean my eyes didn’t almost roll right out of my Berkeley-educated head as I read about the precious clump of students at the University of Ottawa who somehow managed, through a combination of plaintive whining, half-baked ideology and a complete failure on the part of the university to impart sufficient critical thinking skills, to put an end to a very sweet, very benign, free yoga class on campus.

And why? The usual embarrassing, politically correct silliness, of course: something about Western yoga being culturally insensitive, about British colonialism, the diaspora, India being at one point culturally maligned and politically convoluted (thank goodness it’s not that way anymore).”

As I started to read more about this I realized that I was taking that first article as completely factual when it turns out the college now says the class was cancelled because no one came to it and they wanted to look at other ways to use their limited resources to help students.

But! I enjoyed that reactive response about the precious clump of students. It fed right into my sense of moral indignation and outrage at such a misunderstanding of the history of yoga here. I got a little dopamine hit reading the snark.

It brought out the worst in me, as reading things posted on the Internet in a hurry often do.

It seems we have become this incredibly reactive nation. And I can just imagine you must think we are nuts when you listen to the mean-spirited rhetoric from our politicians.

I’d much rather say… “Je suis Canadian” after the incredibly moving pictures of the new Prime Minister telling these travel weary Syrian refugees, “You are home.”

Yes! That is the kind of welcoming, we are all in this together thinking that warms the heart on such a cold, wet, (did I say it was raining?) dark day.

Last updated December 13, 2015