Last Wednesday afternoon, I was fortunate enough to get the chance to sit down and talk with one of John Jay High School’s finest, Mrs. Laura Ingram. She is a math teacher, mother of two, and a major cheese enthusiast. Besides the fact that Mrs. Ingram is basically an algebra guru, she is also extremely approachable, and a great provider of thoughtful advice. Because of this, I decided to ask Mrs. Ingram one question I knew she would have a thought provoking answer to. No surprise here; her response was just that.

“What is the most important piece of advice anyone has ever given to you, and how has it changed the way you view life?”

“So, when I was thinking about the single best piece of advice, I couldn’t decide on what would be the best thing someone had ever said to me. I think that sometimes it’s not one single thing, but that it might be something said at a specific point in your life. So, when I was in my 20’s and I was really stressed out on my way to work, I just randomly passed by this guy, and he looked at me and said ‘Smile! Stress kills!’, and that really, really stuck with me because it made me think, Okay fine, I can’t take something too seriously, I have to just be relaxed about it, but that’s kind of hard to do when you’re in love with a boy and you don’t know whether he loves you back. So just having someone say you need to smile because stress kills, and stress is overwhelming was something memorable for me. And eventually, yes, the story has a happy ending because I was stressed about Steve (my husband), and I now know that yes, Steve does love me. So was the stress worth it? At the time, in my 20’s, it seemed like this is the worst thing ever.

I honestly believe that a stranger can give you better advice than someone who actually knows you. Someone who knows you, knows what you have gone through, knows your personal history, maybe knows something to avoid. But someone who doesn’t know you doesn’t know what to avoid, doesn’t know what trigger words to say or not to say, he/she really doesn’t care about hurting your feelings. So the person who told me ‘Smile, stress kills’, didn’t know what I was stressed about. I could of been stressed about finance, about family. He didn’t know I was thinking about a boy. He just saw that I was upset, and he was offering me that advice. So, advice that I’ve gotten from people who don’t really know me at all kind of sticks with me.

Another thing that I always say, is you never know when you’re making a memory for someone else. So you never know that you’re saying something that someone’s gonna remember. I remember things that my mom said to me when I was a kid that still stick with me, yet she’s already forgotten. Or another time, when someone said something to me and it hurt my feelings, and I’m saying to myself, “Oh I can’t ever do that again”, so I’m still obsessing about it, and the other person probably doesn’t even give it a second thought. I also think the way you interpret advice is different.

Recently, someone that I’m friends with now, but wasn’t very close with at the time, was talking to me about yoga. My friend’s name is Jamie. Jamie is amazing. He’s really flexible, he does tai-chi and lots of yoga. We do yoga together, and one day he says to me ‘Well you just need to learn how to fall’. Sometimes I am so stuck with my disability, that I won’t try something new, so I say to myself things like, Well I can’t do that pose, because I’ll fall and I’ll hurt myself, or I can’t do that because of the screw and I can’t put any pressure on that toe because it’ll hurt so much because of the screw. But like my friend Jamie said, ‘You just need to know how to fall’, and he demonstrated his point by tumbling on the floor, rolling around, looking so free. So then I start to get it a little more. It wasn’t until a few days later that I did end up falling in the bathroom. I could have cracked my head open on the bathtub, and at the time it was almost like that Obi-Wan- Kenobi moment where I then heard Jamie’s voice saying You just need to let your body learn how to fall, and somehow in that moment, my body kind of just took over, and I didn’t hurt myself. There was no one there to see me, yet I didn’t hurt myself, and I didn’t crack my head open, but if I had been so tense in that moment, I could of severely hurt myself.
So in this situation, my friend Jamie is talking about physically learning how to fall, but what if I took that piece of advice, which I have, and connected it to anything in life? You know, you can take anything metaphorically. You don’t always have to look at it literally. So Jamie’s point also taught me that I just need to learn how to accept the failure. What if I just learn how to fall, or learn how to do something that I’m not always going to understand, but just get back in there the next day. While I worry about my limitations and my disability, what if I didn’t have that? What if I didn’t worry about tripping and falling in front of the classroom? Instead of worrying, I am just going to roll with it and pretend it didn’t happen because that’s learning to accept it. Learning how to fall and learning how to deal with failures is advice I have taken not only for my yoga practice, but also emotionally in learning how to accept something.”