good day practice no. 09
On The way
Edition no. 09 · September 27, 2026
This week, we’ve been working with a theme called on the way.
Conveniently, I spent most of it being reminded how much I don’t know. I was in SATYA 1 training with Prajna Yoga all week, which is a small, slow, floor-based practice where very little looks like it's happening from the outside. You lie down and move in ways that barely register, and afterward your body feels reorganized in a way you can't quite explain.
I went in expecting to learn a lot, which I did. But there is a particular experience that comes with studying something more closely: the subject does not get smaller. You notice more. Questions that once seemed fairly straightforward become more interesting. Something you thought you understood turns slightly and shows you another side.
There is a line that gets passed around about how the more you learn, the more you realize how much you don’t know. I tried to find out who actually said it and, appropriately enough, could not get a satisfying answer.
But I know the feeling.
I finished the week knowing more than I did when I walked in and also much more aware of how much there still is to learn. Those two things seem to expand alongside each other. Understanding something better also gives you a clearer view of everything beyond the edge of what you understand.
Which means there is always somewhere further to go, without everything needing to be about getting there.
The week itself was in between.
We started it in summer and crossed into fall somewhere along the way. One season became the next in the middle of everything else that was happening. And, because apparently one transition was not enough for the week, there was also a storm on the way. People love to talk about weather, but people on Cape Cod especially seem to enjoy outdoing one another with increasingly specific information about weather that has not happened yet.
Someone said this. Well, I heard this. Someone knows someone whose weather app says something completely different. For several days the forecast shifted, and the storm became its own little topic of conversation before it had done much of anything at all. By then, the storm existed mostly as something everyone was describing in advance, even as the first signs of it were already showing up around us.
One day at lunch, Julie and I went down to the beach to see what the water was doing. The wind had picked up and the waves were bigger. Whatever was happening farther offshore had already begun to change the edge of the Cape.
We stood there and watched for a while.
There is usually an invisible word attached to on the way.
To.
On the way to knowing more. On the way to fall. A storm on the way to us. On the way to whatever we have decided comes next.
But the way can also mean something else. It can be how something moves rather than where it eventually arrives. The storm was still offshore, but the wind was here. The waves were already different. Summer was becoming fall without waiting for every leaf to turn.
Nothing had to arrive all at once for the change to be underway.
The same was true in training. I wasn’t studying so I could eventually arrive at the point where I knew yoga. There is no such point. Every bit of understanding makes the edges of what I don’t know more visible.
There will always be more to notice. I would rather have a practice that keeps opening than one I can call finished.
The practice
Lie on your back with the soles of your feet together, knees falling open like butterfly wings.
Then take a very long time bringing the knees up to touch.
Slow enough that you find a soft resistance on the way, as if someone were gently pressing down on your legs.
Stay with that resistance instead of pushing through it.
You're not going anywhere. Let the going be the practice.
The Soundtrack
Moving Through
Alexa Sunshine Rose, Aimeé
My Little Light
Beautiful Chorus
The Poem
on the way
They leave in the last warm week of summer,
when one branch of the maple at the field's edge
has gone quietly to flame
and the rest are still deciding.
They lift from the milkweed that raised them
toward mountains none of them has seen,
steering by a memory that was never theirs
across a continent of wind.
Each one was born somewhere in the middle of the story
and will spend its whole bright life inside the crossing,
and still it spends its gold on every field it passes
as though each one were home.
Below them the country is turning as they go.
Each morning the hills they wake above
have gone a shade further into rust,
the birches letting down their small coins,
the sumac smoldering along the roadsides,
so that it seems less like they are leaving the summer
than carrying the fall south on their wings,
a few days ahead of it all the way.
The season is on its way,
the maples loosening their green like a breath let go,
the dark coming earlier each evening
to sit a little longer at the table,
and the monarchs keep company with all of it,
neither early nor late,
exactly as far along as the light.
I used to think the waiting was the price of arriving,
the long toll road to the life I meant to live.
Now I think whatever I am walking toward
has been walking toward me, too,
the way the firs in their high cold valleys
have been leaning all year toward the sound of wings.
Tonight a few of them have come down
into the maple at the edge of the field,
wings folded, hanging among the turning leaves,
and in the last light I cannot tell
the wings from the leaves,
all of them holding on a little longer,
all of them already on their way.
THE THROUGHLINE
I’m on the way to knowing what I’m doing. On the way to getting better at this. On the way to wherever I have decided the more settled version of my life must be waiting.
The destination changes, but the structure is pretty consistent: this part is leading to that part.
There is nothing wrong with that. I want things. I care about becoming better at work that matters to me.
But five days of training made the limits of that way of thinking unusually obvious. I left knowing considerably more than I knew at the beginning of the week, and with a much clearer sense of how much more there is to know.
I don’t actually want to reach a point where there is nothing left to learn about the work I care about. I don’t want a yoga practice that I have figured out so completely that it can no longer surprise me.
The rest of life probably deserves some of that room, too. Maybe on the way does not always need the to.
There is the direction we are headed, and then there is the way we are moving through whatever is here now. The two can exist at the same time. None of it requires standing still until something arrives.
I can still want what comes next. I can make plans and work toward them. I just don’t want to keep treating the life happening before I get there as preliminary.
The storm can still be offshore while the waves change at your feet.
SOMETHING TO CARRY INTO YOUR WEEK
Where have you quietly added a to after on the way?
What is happening before you get there?
Smile & sigh. Yay.
Let’s make a good day of it,
Bevin
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