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Someone stole my yoga mat.
Late the night be, I’d parked my Jeep outside my apartment after yoga class. The moment I turned off the ignition, I let myself get distracted by reaching for my phone and texting someone to look at the moon. I was texting and laughing, completely oblivious to my usual post-class routine, as I headed upstairs. It wasn’t until early the next morning when I glanced at the space along the hallway where I always place my mat that I registered its absence. Maybe it sounds strange, but in that moment, I knew it was stolen.
Well, I knew that I had left it on the front passenger floor. I knew that I had locked the doors but left the rear windows open. I knew that the parking space backed onto an alley where there are no lights. That there was always foot traffic in that alley. That my neighbors cautioned me to be careful out back alone at night. Yet I’d somehow managed to leave it anyways.
In the 45 or so seconds it took me to make my way to my parking space to confirm, I cycled from self-blame, to indignance, to outrage, and back to self-blame as I imagined someone breaking into my Jeep and recklessly taking what belonged to me. I told myself it was only a mat and that it could be replaced. I reminded myself of Sanskrit terms and yogic principles I should embrace. These barely registered. Instead I thought about whether to stalk the alley and look for a person lugging my mat. I started doing arithmetic gymnastics in my head to figure out how I’d afford a replacement mat.
Yet when I saw my mat had actually disappeared, I felt something else entirely.
Relief.
To be clear, my relief was not selfless. It was not angelic relief that someone who is unhoused had a cushier place to sleep that night or had something they could pawn at the shop across the street. It was not a charitable belief that one of the individuals who regularly created drama in the back alley simply had a bad night. I was not so gracious. My relief was exclusively for myself.
In the almost ten years since I’d been gifted it, I had catharted on that mat. Cried on that mat. Arm balanced on that mat. Learned to be still on that mat. Gotten outraged on that mat. Pleaded with whatever gods or spirits that may or may not exist on that mat. Confronted more than I’d wanted to on that mat. With that rectangle of natural rubber as my touchstone, I had remembered who I was through past versions of myself, versions I no longer needed, on that mat.
The person I was today was holding the person who took my mat in contempt. Yet they had also ended up with a lot of heavy emotions I’d been lugging around. Well, they ended up with the physical reminder of that baggate. But it felt sort of the same.
Turns out a lot of other people have had their yoga mats stolen. Many describe an understandable feeling of melancholy afterward. Some say they were forced to confront an emotional attachment they never knew they’d had. Given the intensity of my relief, I had to ask myself if my attachment was to more than the mat. But maybe the emotions we each experience when we lose a mat that’s accompanied us through eras of our life isn’t about losing the mat. It’s about losing a part of our story.
I’m still working through my other attachment—the last of my resentment toward whoever stole it. But they say karma’s a bitch, so I’m turning the situation over to it. And as emotionally loaded as that mat was, to the person who has it, good luck.
