I’m away from home for a while, travelling in Greece with my husband for his work and my pleasure. I packed up my yoga mat and my travel zafu and hoped that I was all ready to take my practice on the road. Except it’s not that simple, just uprooting from your routines and expecting necessarily to maintain continuity of practice. So I haven’t. And actually I’m OK with that. There’s always tomorrow, and I know my practice will still be there when I want it.
For now I am so much enjoying being back in Athens for a few days.
It’s the city where my husband and I met and we have many memories of our separate lives and then our intertwined lives. We’ve been exploring old haunts and finding new corners. Yesterday we walked for hours across the city, stopping for various refreshments along the way, people watching, window shopping, flummoxing shopkeepers and waiters with my Greek that’s perfectly accented but terribly limited.
Everything feels so familiar and yet has a vivid freshness from returning after a time away. There is novelty in the mundane, and I’m enjoying such effortless ‘being present’.
So that’s how my practice will feel after a couple of days’ break. When I come back to it, there’ll be a clarity, an underlying familiarity but overlaid with a new perspective. The simplest acts (rolling out a mat/ordering a coffee) will become more active choices (opening up my mat bag and figuring out where best to position my mat in a hotel room of not generous proportions/Greek coffee, hot or cold, sugared or plain, and in which particular cafe).
And just as I settled down to write this in the archaeological library where my husband is doing his research, an old friend came upon me tucked away at a corner desk. Such serendipity. A joyful suprise for us both. Another moment to seize.
For my yoga practice, there’s always tomorrow.
For today’s there’s simple joy in just being here:Â 
