UNDER CONTROL?

My lovely T.J.Maxx yoga mat, temporarily retired

Things have been pretty uncertain at my workplace lately. I work for a magazine publisher, and publishing has been a real mess pretty much since the invention of the Internet. It gets worse every year. No one knows what to do with iPads and smartphones and Google's ever-changing algorithms for search-engine optimization. We're competing with not only other magazines but also TV shows, social networks, blogs, Candy Crush Saga, you get the idea. There are a million forms of entertainment these days; how many of us are really picking up a magazine anymore?

Nevertheless, I hang on. Publishing retains its glamorous sheen, despite the continuing closure of magazine brands every month. Even Express stores carry pants with names like "Editor" and "Columnist." And of course, my job comes with the perk of getting to travel on someone else's dime to popular destination-wedding and honeymoon locations. Who could willingly walk away from that?

But it's a stressful time to work in this field. Since the beginning of 2013, my company has sold and/or closed 12 magazines. Twelve! We've gone from 50 brands to 38. Every couple weeks there's more shocking news coming down the pike, more friends laid off, fewer people to do more work.

Last week we got more bad news: The onsite office space a group of us had been using for a lunchtime yoga practice on Tuesdays and Thursdays was finally leased after a year, so yoga was on indefinite hold.

As my friend Vicky said, "I can't take another loss!" Yoga has come to mean so much to me in these last few months, and the convenience of having a twice-weekly class right at the office, with my friends, has been a huuuuuge blessing. It's a weekly gift in the midst of monthly disappointment. It's a quiet, healing space when my brain just won't let me be. It's a physical release I don't have to give up, even during a treatment cycle.

I know I can find another yoga practice, but I don't WANT to. I love this instructor. I love the timing, the location and the other people in the class. I loved the certainty that, twice a week, even if everything was NOT OK AT ALL, it was OK for an hour.

Now everything feels, in a word, uncertain.

Will we be able to find another open space at the office for our yoga class? Will my magazine brand survive the massive sea change engulfing publishing right now? Will I have a job next year, next month ... ? Will I ever be a parent?

I know nothing in life is a guarantee, but I enjoy that feeling that at least SOMETHING is under control -- that if I don't have X, at least there is always Y.

Of course, I haven't lost everything, so I don't want to sound over-dramatic. I have an amazing husband, and he has a lucrative (if demanding) job. Our cats are healthy, and so are we for that matter, save our largely unexplained infertility.

But going into work day to day and feeling like the the proverbial other shoe is hovering over my head, threatening to drop at any moment, doesn't feel great. It's stressful, and it makes me feel even more out of control during a time when I have already lost control of our future and our ability to build our family.

So losing yoga was kind of the last straw.

Except ... it's not. I carry on, and I'd carry on even if my magazine closed and I was thrust into the unpredictable land of unemployment. Yoga may come back, or I may find another practice. I may get pregnant and I may not. Whatever happens, life keeps moving forward.

I suppose none of us really has control over anything; it just feels like we do when things go our way. And maybe I'm just the beneficiary of some giant life lesson about letting go and letting God. I could probably learn said lesson a lot faster if I weren't so cynical, so stubborn, and clinging so insistently to the few areas of my life that still feel halfway under my control.

The greatest irony of all: Yoga teaches open hands and open hearts. Guess here's my chance to really apply my practice, even in the absence of it.