What Year 9 DT taught me about yoga
We went to the beach yesterday morning, for digging and building and kite flying. The kite was a project from Year 9 Design Technology (DT - which at the time involved woodwork, metalwork and the odd bit of plastic, textiles, and food technology). Our kites had to advertise a product: this was the 90s, when the technology curriculum had a huge focus on design, using IT, and developing business skills. Who else remembers how one page of GCSE DT coursework had to be printed on the A3 printer, to show that you knew how to design a printed layout and use a printer?! Only one page, mind, because A3 colour printing was expensive. Anyway, my kite advertised Jack Wolfskin, mainly because it looked like an easy logo to recreate. Unlike most other DT projects, it still flies well all these years later.
I didn’t particularly enjoy DT. It was hard work, and you had to live with your mistakes in a much more visible way than in written subjects, where it’s easy to turn the page and start again. My memories of lesson time is mainly of not being able to properly see demonstrations, waiting to use equipment, then pissing off everyone else because I’d forgotten how to use the equipment. I don’t think it massively improved my technical skills either. Like most people, much of what I made looked a bit crap/didn’t function properly/tasted awful/didn’t get finished.
Yet now the DT projects seem disproportionately significant in the ‘what I learned/made/did at school’ compartment of my memories. Is it because they took a longer period of time, or because there was a physical process so different to that in other subjects? Is it because of the odd, forced creativity of the DT curriculum at that time, where we had to ‘design’ recipes or sewing patterns rather than learn by copying? Certainly that made the outcome feel more personalized, whether good or bad.
This isn’t a ‘you should stick with what you don’t enjoy’ post. A lot of my time in DT was really miserable, too miserable to compensate for the character building aspect of the subject. A functioning kite isn’t sufficient compensation either. The point of my ramble is more that yoga practice is a bit like DT lessons, where projects take a long time and require creativity, but then stick in your mind. Think about the physical practice of asana, the mental practice of meditation, the social practices of the yamas (attitudes towards our environment), or the self-focused practices of the niyamas and dharna (respectively, attitudes towards ourselves and concentration). Each of those takes a long time. Our mistakes are visible, adaptation and self-correction require our energy, and quite often the specific skill to which yoga is being applied will end up being irrelevant in a few years time. For me, learning how to do headstand has as much lifelong value as learning how to use an A3 colour printer.
Yoga is messy and doesn’t get finished. There are times when the task or method does not benefit us as individuals, and unlike at school, we should have the choice to swap out of those processes and replace them with something that will be more valuable. But over a lifetime these never-ending and ‘looks a bit crap’ efforts become significant. Choose your yoga carefully, make it into a practice where you can be creative/frustrated/incomplete in safe contexts, and take the time to notice the lifetime gains.