The Scenic Route

The Long Way Round

There’s a phrase we hear a lot in yoga, when the student is ready, the teacher appears. It gets said so often it can sound a bit trite, like a spiritual shrug, but underneath it there’s something much deeper. It’s really about patience. About staying in the practice long enough for things to ripen. About discipline, not force. About showing up, again and again, without trying to rush the moment when something finally clicks.

That’s been on my mind a lot lately.

I was really moved by a post from Patrick Franco Jr., where he writes about late bloomers and lifers, the people who stay devoted long after the initial excitement wears off. He talks about patience showing up as devotion, and that really landed for me. He says, “If you’re still in it, still learning, still listening, you’re not behind, you’re just on a longer timeline.” I love that. It feels so true.

Because devotion isn’t glamorous. It’s not easy. It’s showing up when you’re stiff, when you don’t feel like you fit in, when you feel too big or too small, when you’re convinced everyone else knows more than you. And still, you come back. You unroll the mat. You sit. You listen. You keep going, without the reward, without the reassurance.

Yoga has taught me that in ways nothing else has.

And maybe that’s why I’m feeling quite resistant to the current social media trend of looking back to 2016. If I’m honest, it makes me wince. 2016 was a shitshow for me personally, and for my ideals. There were huge global events that we’re still trying to process and assimilate, and on a very personal level there was a massive transition in my own life that year. It wasn’t cute. It wasn’t aesthetic. And no, it wasn’t just the year I bleached my hair and it all broke off, although that was also fairly traumatic.

I’m sure there’s some integration still needed there, but it’s not something I feel the need to do performatively on Instagram.

What I’m much more interested in is where I am now. At nearly 49, I’m still practising. Still studying. Still curious. And honestly, I feel more energised now than I have in a long time. There’s a sense of things aligning, quietly, without drama.

Which brings me to something I want to share gently.

I’ve been accepted into university.

That sentence still feels a bit surreal to write. It’s something I’ve known I wanted for a long time, but I just kept studying in my own way, trusting that if I stayed close to learning, the timing would eventually reveal itself. And it has. Nearly 31 years after I first should have gone, I’m starting from the beginning. A foundation year, because my A-levels are shocking, followed by a full degree. Four years in total.

And strangely, that doesn’t feel overwhelming at all.

In fact, it feels like a gift.

Committing to four years of study feels spacious, not daunting. A huge chunk of time to really dive into something. My yoga practice is nearly 20 years old, and it still teaches me, still refreshes me, still asks new questions. I’ve been teaching yoga for nearly 15 years, and the learning curve is still very real. I’m still discovering things. Still refining. Still listening.

So when I look at a four-year university degree, I don’t see delay. I see depth. I see patience in action. I see the long way round.

And once you start noticing late bloomers, you see them everywhere.

Friends finding love later in life.

People returning to creativity in their 50s and 60s.

Friends who start painting, writing, building businesses after raising families.

A close friend reigniting her jazz singing now, not earlier.

What connects them isn’t outcome. It’s devotion. Staying power. The willingness to begin again, or keep going, without needing it to look a certain way.

If 2016 felt like a dismantling, this moment feels more like a coherence. Not because everything is perfect or resolved, especially not in the wider world, but because in my own life there’s a sense of things weaving together. My practice. My teaching. The way the Brahmavihāras have naturally become the backbone of my work. The way study has never left me, even when it didn’t have a formal container. The way the decision to apply for university arrived not with urgency, but with quiet certainty.

And as Patrick Franco says, time isn’t the enemy, depth takes patience, recognition isn’t the same as progress.

Some of us just take the scenic route