“I’m on my mat now and that’s that”

“I’m on my mat now and that’s that” is a brief self-soothing formula associated with Patrick Mullaney. First introduced as instruction from a yoga teacher, it returns in Patrick’s thoughts when homelessness, legal danger, and other pressures converge; the phrase offers a momentary structure for composure without resolving the conditions that threaten it.

Origin in a Yoga Class

While receiving medical attention for chest pains, Patrick finds a clinic leaflet about nutrition for adolescents and learns that a doctor has attributed his own chest pains to stress and petrol-station coffee. The doctor signs him up for a yoga class in Rooskey. Patrick attends only once, but remembers the instructor’s guidance: when things are getting bad, find a quiet space, close the eyes, and repeat, “I’m on my mat now and that’s that.”

The wording turns a physical posture into a verbal boundary. It gives Patrick a compact instruction to withdraw from pressure and attend to the present moment. Its plain, definitive ending sounds more certain than the unstable circumstances in which he later uses it.

Patrick’s Recollection Under Pressure

The phrase recurs when Patrick and his brother, Tee-J, are listening to death metal and discussing the need to go to Doggie’s because they have to eat. Tee-J mentions that a doctor said he had “wet-brain thinkin’” and should avoid alcohol; Patrick, meanwhile, remembers the yoga instruction. The recollection sits among immediate needs rather than apart from them: hunger, health worries, and the brothers’ precarious situation remain unresolved.

Later, Patrick thinks the shortened version, “I’m on my mat, and that’s that,” while anticipating a chain of possible consequences. Enya’s father may confront him; the guards may learn about crystal meth in Roxy’s; wire cutters left in the van could contribute to his return to Castlerea jail. He is also dealing with failing teeth, worsening greyness, chest pains and stress, the lack of a roof, and Tee-J’s likelihood of getting into fights. The white Hitachi is immobilized, though Patrick still hopes that fixing its exhaust could make it fully functional. In this catalogue of threats, the remembered phrase is a deliberate attempt to steady himself, not evidence that the threats have passed.

Meaning and Narrative Function

The refrain’s recurrence links a doctor’s advice and an ordinary class exercise to the brothers’ wider insecurity. Its language insists on a quiet space and a settled conclusion, while Patrick’s circumstances offer neither reliable shelter nor assurance of safety. The small mental pause it provides therefore coexists with practical danger rather than overcoming it.

The phrase also changes slightly in Patrick’s later thought: the instructor’s “now” gives way to the compressed “and that’s that.” The shortened recollection retains the gesture of self-composure, but its finality is in tension with a life in which difficulties keep accumulating. Its significance lies in that contrast: it gives Patrick a repeatable means of holding himself together, even when he can do little to control what comes next.