The Godfather and the Yogi

Summary

An older man reluctantly adopts yoga into his fitness routine after his wife, of Sicilian and French descent, discovers his difficulty in bending over and the resulting accumulation of socks under the bed, leading to an improvement in his flexibility and maintaining harmony in his marriage.

Abstract

The author, having reached his sixties, prides himself on maintaining fitness through exercise and mountain biking but neglected stretching. After facing increasing inflexibility, particularly in picking up dropped socks, his wife's discovery of the hidden socks and her Sicilian-French background prompted her to introduce him to yoga. Despite initial skepticism and humorous reservations about the authenticity of yoga poses, he began practicing yoga to avoid further marital strife. The yoga practice has since improved his flexibility, allowing him to reclaim lost mobility and maintain a peaceful relationship with his wife.

Opinions

The author initially considered stretching and yoga to be unnecessary, akin to reading instructions for DIY furniture, and preferred to engage in more vigorous exercise.
He humorously describes his adaptation to reduced flexibility with a technique called the "sock flip," which had its own shortcomings.
The author has a playful imagination regarding the origins of yoga, picturing yogis inventing poses as a joke.
He implies a fear of retribution, jokingly referencing "The Godfather," if he were to resist his wife's insistence on yoga.
Despite his initial resistance, the author acknowledges the benefits of yoga in improving his flexibility and overall mobility, though he does not aspire to master advanced poses.

How I accidentally discovered the benefits of yoga

Alexas Fotos Pixabay

I have reluctantly cast off my fifties and slipped unwillingly into my sixties. I exercise regularly, do plenty of mountain biking and throw a few weights around but that does not make the humiliation anymore acceptable. The most positive thing I can say about the aging process is that it is better than the alternative.

Despite always maintaining a reasonable level of fitness there has always been one area where I didn’t really put in too much effort — stretching. To me, the pre-exercise stretch sessions always seemed a little unnecessary. Sure, some people needed to do them, but I was exempt from such humdrum activity. I was more of a skip forward to the real thing sort of a guy.

Stretching was like reading the instructions before assembling DIY furniture. You might end up with a few unidentified bits and bobs left over at the end, and one of the doors keeps falling off, but that’s all just part of the fun.

Recently, however, bending over had started to become a little more difficult. I could still touch my toes but it involved a two-day journey with an overnight stop somewhere around my knees. It is quite amazing how you learn to adapt to minor inconveniences like this. If I happened to drop a sock on the floor while dressing or undressing I developed a technique known as the sock flip. This involved flicking the dropped item onto the bed with my toes and then picking it up from there; an altogether less painful exercise.

The problem with the sock flip is that it was not an entirely perfect technique. Occasionally, the offending item would fail to gather enough uplift and it would then drift off course and vanish beneath the bed. Retrieving it would have been too difficult a manoeuvre so, instead, I would simply fetch another pair of socks from the draw and drop the lone leftover sock into the wash basket.

Socks have a notoriously low fidelity rate and tend to separate as easily as Hollywood stars do anyway. Because of this, I was fairly confident that my faithful and long-suffering wife would never notice that I had played a part in some of these underwear divorces.

Steve Buissinne Pixabay

The whole system was ticking along quite well until the delightful Madame A. decided to clean under the bed. (I didn’t even know that was a thing). When she discovered the hotchpotch of socks that had accumulated there her reaction was not one of loving-kindness. I should point out at this stage that although she is part French, Madam A. is also part Sicilian. Neither my wife nor my in-laws are the sort of people you want to get on the wrong side of. Among my in-laws, the film The Godfather is not considered mere entertainment. Instead, it is a revered cross between a historical masterpiece and a training movie.

Madame A. had previously remarked on my lack of flexibility on several occasions, but now that it had directly impacted on her house cleaning regime she was determined to take corrective action. Madame A. is not only part Sicilian, but she is also into yoga. How dangerous a combination was that for a man who couldn’t quite remember what his toes looked like? I was placed in front of a computer screen while she furiously typed in some instructions. Soon, a YouTube video popped up in which a young lady made out of rubber, or some other bendy sort of material, proceeded to tie herself in knots.

The whole concept of yoga has always been one that I battled to come to terms with. I have visions of a bunch of yogis in India sitting around a table full of beers after a hard day’s work at the ashram. All of them are doubled up with laughter. When they finally start to get their breath back, one of them says, “If you think that’s good, I not only got them to pay a hundred bucks a day, I persuaded them to all line up in a row with their butts in the air and then I told them that this was an ancient pose called the downward-facing dog.” At this, the yogis all crease up again and go into yet more spasms of thigh-slapping laughter.

IreneSommerfeld-Stur Pixabay

By then I was in far too much trouble to dare share this little mental image with my wife and so I was forced to make clumsy efforts at following Rubber Woman on the screen. I know that a stronger willed man might have put up some resistance. He might have refused to balance on one leg with his hands joined neatly in front of his chest while considering his third eye. He could have baulked at the cow pose or even resisted a salute to the sun. This braver man might have stormed off and continued to work on his sock flip technique….. he also might have woken up with a horse’s head in his bed.

In conclusion, I should point out that I am unlikely to ever be able to tie myself in knots like that obscenely flexible young lady on YouTube. That desire to sit around with my ankles behind my head just hasn’t solidified.

Although my downward facing dog, my tree pose and my cobra are not, and probably never will be, perfect, my flexibility has increased dramatically. I can now pick up mutinous items of underwear quite comfortably, and yes, once in a while my wife still talks to me.