10 Wishes

A little over a year ago, I took a yoga class with a good friend of mine. It was one of those long meditative yoga classes where you hold positions until you’re in pain and listen to the instructor tell you to breath and find your inner peace. Come to think of it, it was probably one of the last yoga classes I ever took. I gave up the sport.

But in this particular class, the instructor asked each of us, deep in downward facing dog, to make a wish. It could be one or many, but to wish for something for the sake of wishing, to breathe it in deep and let it go. We were supposed to take control of the wishes, master them and make them a part of the space we were taking up.  In that moment making the wishes wasn’t about having them come true, but knowing they were out there for us to bring in and out like a breath and only we could make them true.

I made ten wishes. I held my breath, closed my eyes and wished my way out of downward dog.

Maybe that’s not what I was supposed to take away from that class, but I made ten wishes and wrote them down. I believe in them. I said to myself “I am wishing that I can make these wishes come true for myself.”

1.     POC. I had just completed my first production-coordinating gig. It was short but I carried the credit with pride. I would NOT go back to being an assistant anything. I was making the leap and I wished to stay there. I wished to knock POC out of the park and never look back. (A year later all I can wish for is to be a Supervisor. The world is not enough.)

2.     RB. Rhet Butler. Love is like Gone with the Wind. One minute it’s beautiful Tara and then next it’s a freaking Civil War. It’s confusing, impractical, and can’t decide what it wants. Neither can Rhet Butler and Scarlett, they hate each other, love each other, can’t stand to be together and yet they can be with no other. This was a wish for everything to be as lovely as Tara before the war but to have Rhet come back to me instead of Ashley.

3.    Irma. Somehow my Great Aunt Irma and I are connected. To the point I cannot sleep. About the time of this yoga class, it had been a year since her stroke and really the moment when my true Aunt Irma died, she has never been the same. Also around the time of this yoga class, she jumped out of her wheelchair and ended right back in the nursing home she was a year before. I wished for her peace. She still hasn’t found it but every week I visit her she tells me the day is near, as I clean out the apartment she’ll never come back to, I know she’s right. I wonder if I will be surprised when my wish finally does come true, though I will be no less sad for knowing.

4.     CC 1, 2, 3. If this yoga class hadn’t be free via my friend’s gym membership, I wouldn’t have been able to afford to go.  I wished for friend from my own credit card debt – all three of them.  Wishing that financial debt to go away is like wishing to win the lottery to pay it off, you can’t win unless you buy a ticket. I don’t gamble so I just starting paying my credit cards every week.  I’m actually 1 payment away on the 3^rd and final card from freedom.

5.     Savings. I wished for a savings bank account. Like the one my parents opened for me when I was 8 and wanted to put away my allowance that was always spent before I event earned it. I mean, I was going to be 30 and didn’t have a savings account with any money in it. Opening the account itself was an easy wish to come true, Chase bank was more than happy to charge me to open it. Putting money in it, another story. Though, now I’m 30 and I have both the account and a few piggy banks worth of change in it.

6.     Travel. I really want to go everywhere. I want to see everything. But the older we get, the more responsibilities we have and the harder it is to escape. I’m overly fortunate that I have family abroad and almost every year I get to visit Paris to see them. I love Paris. Paris is boring. I want travel adventures. I want to see others worlds lost within our own. I went to Iceland. Sure, I spent the savings to do it but I wished for that too and it came true.

7.     NSP. (NouveauStar Pictures). Back in 2007 I started a film company. I thought I was going to produce a feature in the first year. I’m so glad I didn’t or I’d have even more debt. I wasn’t as smart back then as I think I am now. But I still wish for this company to do great things, I know I am and it will but I’d like them to happen together, and soon.

8.     Family. I don’t know why I didn’t just wish for easy things, like a car or a chocolate candy bar with a golden ticket. Instead, I wished for things like bringing my family closer together. My family is crazy and I love them and they are my strength and the best thing in the world to me and I just wish for them to always be safe and together and I know at the end of the world when it’s us against them, we are totally winning.

9.     Home. I wished for a home. Not a house but a home, more than what I carry with me from place to place. Sure, I was in a yoga class with my best friend and roommate, and after class we stopped for frozen yogurt (maybe I made that up) and went back to our Williamsburg apartment “home”. It was a safe place, ours, we could walk around in our underwear and eat ice cream at 4AM, but it wasn’t really each of our own homes, it was a place we piled our stuff, and emotions, anxieties, baggage… I think wished for my own home more specifically and that wish is coming true.  Of course once I’m alone in it for a week I’m sure I’ll start thinking of filling it with a stay-at-home husband who does dishes and a few screaming children who will knock over all my keepsakes.

10.  Book. At the time, I was working on a cookbook. I wish I’d finished it. I wish I would already. With all the other wishes I wished into being, I think this wish can wait. Who knows, maybe I’ll write ten books!