Count On Me

People purport to learn a lot of things from yoga; mindfulness, rhythmic breathing, spirituality, the list goes on. Yet recent yoga practice has drilled something simpler into my head.

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Although I’ve lived in South Vietnam for almost a year now, I still speak a shamefully low amount of Vietnamese. I do feel I’ve made a little progress, especially where food and beverage are concerned, yet I’m too often rendered only able to hold up a finger and mime that I want one of what everyone else is having at the broth stand. It feels like just yesterday when I tried to order coffee with milk and ended up with a cup of milk (I still drank it). Through this time, though, my confidence with one crucial facet of language has remained elusive. Counting to ten and being able to communicate its multiples, it should be said, is probably among the first things one should learn—knowing numbers is useful in order to understand, say, how much to pay for a beer. Nevertheless, it came slowly and painfully in my case.

It took, then, a recurring hour of pain for me to get things down. Here is where yoga comes in. Lately, I’ve been practicing at a studio that instructs in three languages, but, as my off-hours are in the daytime, I have tended toward sparsely-attended classes conducted primarily in Vietnamese. Due to my lack of flexibility, a large part of yoga class is characterized by agonizing breaths and a single thought crossing my mind: how many seconds until the next pose.

The number system is, of course, rather important in this activity. Although, in truth, the count rarely goes beyond 8, it is most often in reverse order. The first few sessions, I would regularly hear a number, then have to count up to figure out where we were. Ah, the language learner’s journey.

Bon. Four seconds to freedom.

Ba. Why am I sweating so much more than everyone else? My mat looks like a war zone.

Hai. Okay, I know where we are now.

Mot. I hope I’m not breaking an unspoken rule by taking my shirt off.

Repeat. I’m also getting a hang of ‘inhale’ and ‘exhale’, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.