Got stress?

 It’s nothing that a good yoga session can’t fix. A couple of stretching positions and some focused breathing can dissolve your troubles in a half hour. Between soccer practice, taxes, car repairs, bizarre co-workers, and bad hair days, stress levels are soaring in my California community. I guess a lotus position makes perfect sense.

Day spas are booming, too. A half-day’s program, with themes like “Utopia” and “Tiny Bubbles at Waikiki” sets you back about three hundred bucks. You need the first three hours to ameliorate the stress you incur with the cost of the treatment, leaving that last hour, baby, for a sweet fix. Sir Thomas More and Don Ho would be proud to be associated with such fine programs.

In my neighborhood, everyone likes the word stress. It’s blamed for male pattern baldness, bad marriages, lousy karma, and the common cold. Who knew? If I had known stress was such a killer, I would’ve signed up for yoga classes long ago and saved myself a lot of trouble.

The sun was shining bright and my post-yoga-class limbs were loosened-up for a new day. The better news though, was that while leaving the studio I’d acquired a new mat.

“Finders keepers, losers weepers,” I sung in my head. “So-long $19.99 sucker from Target that always makes me slip.” This new mat is posh and sturdy and made in Malaysia.  My soundtrack was cut-short though, when bragging of the story to my sister Courtney the next day.

“You what!? You took that from the lost and found, Abb…what are you thinking!? That’s somebody else’s mat…good mat…and they’re probably a wreck about losing it.”
“Umm…oh…I…uh, thought you’d be excited. I was thinking that somebody lost something, and I found it, so now it’s mine. Their loss, my gain kinda thing?”