Our Story: Part 10 - Alchemy

Training at LOT42 was such a privilege! With 25’ of vertical space to play in, it was an aerialist’s dream!

Of course, being a shared space, there were challenges that came along with the use of such an awesome facility. Especially when your neighbour for the week is the tech crew for a rock band.

We learned quickly how to turn difficult situations into something positive, and how to stop apologizing for things that are beyond our control. We have taught classes to the backdrop of lifts beeping, tables scraping across concrete floors, and concert sound checks. We have taught through mini floods, and on floors sticky with beer (after scrubbing it by hand before the students showed up). And we did it all with a shrug, a smile, and a positive word, no matter how low and frustrated we felt in the moment.

So many times it would have been easier to complain, apologize for what we can’t control, or just give up entirely.

People will follow you into the dumps, or they’ll rise with you into the sky. We chose to rise and be thankful for what we had, while looking ahead to bigger goals. We realized that we could exist in a state of gratefulness yet continue to strive for more, and that ability to hold space for both kept us from burning a lot of wonderful and important relationships.

Next time, read about how we moved out of this space and into our first commercial lease, thinking, “now no one can tell us when we can and can’t run our programming! We can do whatever we want!” And then a pandemic hit.