#Reverb12 Day 12: Intense Emotions

For the month of December, I'm working on doing the daily series of Reverb prompts to help me reflect on the prior year and hope/plan for the upcoming year. If you're interested, join in; I found this to be a very useful exercise when I did it two years ago.

#reverb12 Day 12: Your most intense emotions?


What made you dance in 2012? What made you weep?

Thankfully, I wouldn't describe 2012 as a year of intense emotions.  I'm not an overly emotional person anyway.  I would say the lowest point was having my grandmother pass away, but we weren't exceptionally close, and she had been mentally gone for a couple years, and it was seen as a blessing in many ways.  I would say the highest point was winning my first marathon this past spring (a small marathon, and I didn't even know I'd won when I crossed the finish line, but I was so excited afterward).

But generally, in terms of intense highs and lows, I think part of what prevented me from having many intense emotions either way was all the yoga I did this year.  I did two separate 30 day Bikram yoga challenges (going to class daily for a month) in January and August.  Besides those two months, I did about 20 classes of mildly heated yoga, and about 20 other Bikram classes.  Particularly with Bikram, I like the focus on your breathing and I felt like it took me many, many hours to calm my mind, but when I finally got there, many intense emotions seemed to evaporate.  It's odd, but I seemed to notice this most in my driving -- on my way to yoga, I was always in a hurry, trying to get there before the doors shut, and was easily irritated by any jack@ss on the road.  Occasionally the irritation would be reflected with my horn.  Seriously, how much greener can the light get?  How on earth do you think you can turn left directly in front of me when you're in the center lane, I'm in the left lane, and I'm going straight?  Etc.  But after class, even in a hurry to get home, exhausted and starving, I was far more inclined to let it go.  To wave in acknowledgement to someone who did something risky rather than waving in anger (with or without a finger). 

I like my life to be on an even keel, and I really don't like drama, so I'm happy that I don't look at 2012 as an emotionally intense year in any way.