It’s 4:52 on a Wednesday afternoon and, because I have somewhere to be, it seems the world is suddenly moving more slowly than usual. The car in front of me is creeping; pedestrians seem to have formed a union and declared a street-crossing slowdown; I swear I saw a bus driver pause to avoid hitting a squirrel. What is going on? Why is everyone suddenly being so nice, so uncharacteristically civilized, when I am in a rush? My yoga class starts in eight minutes and if I’m late I’ll get stuck in the back, I’ll miss the om part, everything will be —

It is at this point that the sane part of me overhears the conversation going on in a strange and scary corner of my brain, and, before I can devise a plan to use my yoga mat as a weapon against the driver in front of me, it thankfully intervenes.

Me (voice of reason): You are being very un-yoga.

Me (ready to sacrifice slow-moving pigeons for the cause): But if I’m late I’ll have to stand next to the grunting guy and then I’ll never be able to center myself.

Me (schoolmarm pushed to the brink): Get a grip. You sound like someone we make fun of.

Me: But he’s so distracting —

Me: Shut up, I’m trying to park.

Then I run for the yoga studio, pushing aside other straggling yogis and hurdling small dogs, wondering how I’ve reached this point. The journey started innocently enough three years ago, when I went to my first yoga class with the best of intentions: to slow down, breathe more, cultivate compassion for myself and others. Carpe diem and all that shit. But today, as I contemplate murder on my way to the studio, I realize that something has gone horribly wrong: I am like Donald Rumsfeld in yoga pants, hell-bent and kind of enjoying it. Fuck pedestrians! Fuck international diplomacy!

I realize that in life, you sometimes have to take strange, even seemingly contradictory paths to get where you want to go. Standing still as the hornet buzzes around your face; cutting your hair so it will grow long; remaining calm when faced with drowning: these are all counterintuitive yet effective ways to achieve your goals, or at least to get by.

But while this might work the next time you come across a charging mountain lion, I find it questionable when it comes to other matters. For example, going to war for the purpose of attaining peace has always made me cock my head, confused-puppy style. Same with the approach so many of us have taken to reduce stress, find balance, and simplify our lives: squeezing in a yoga class between work and the next activity, cluttering our homes with material things that promise to help us simplify and reduce our dependency on material things. Sometimes all the clichés are true: what walks like a duck is a duck. What seems like a contradiction is a contradiction. Rushing to a relaxing yoga class is, in fact, stressful.

Which is not to say that the way out of this conundrum is to obsess about our inability to chill. No-o. Then we’d really be screwed. The thing is, reducing stress and simplifying our lives — if that’s what we want — means learning a new way to learn. Living in a nation that prides itself on its Protestant work ethic, we understand how to set our minds to a task and accomplish it, à la the American dream. We are taught that if you want to learn to play the piano, master your times tables, stop smoking, what you need most is the discipline to do — or not do — the desired activity. Even when you want to lose weight, you’re counseled to eat more protein, or more carbs, or more reduced-fat chocolate cake, depending on which marketing scam you fall victim to. It is this additive approach to change that gets in our way when we try to reduce the presence of things like stress. Our knee-jerk instinct to add more activities and cultivate new practices keeps us on the same treadmill from which we hoped these activities would liberate us.

If you think I’m leading up to divulging the answer to this and other great paradoxes, you are, of course, wrong, wrong, wrong. Self-help and " freedom fries " are pretty much neck-and-neck on my Things That Make Me Squirm scale. For myself, I have no plans to stop doing yoga, or even to stop claiming that someday I will meditate, buy less, learn to play the sitar. But as I add these things to the roster, I’m going to have to let go of some other things. And next time I catch myself growling at pigeons in the interest of catching a good downward dog, I hope the voice of reason drives my sorry self to the park for a good long sit, where, in the interest of doing less, I will actually do less.

When not learning Swahili or assaulting slow drivers with her yoga mat, Rebecca Wieder can be reached at rebezca@juno.com