Stand #44—-On Dancing Through Life
Sunday, December 29th, 2013
I had simply become accustomed to things being fine. I got my miles in, I slept better at night, I felt more alert and focused each day, and my body was even being tolerant of my extended mileage; my runs were fine. And we all know exactly what that means: my runs were anything but fine. (Author’s Note: no fine person has ever referred to themselves as fine.) My runs had become nothing more than a painful reminder of how little I had spent on my earphones. A pair of beat-up Sony earbuds, circa 1999, was all that stood between my runs and complete masochism; the music was the only thing keeping me going throughout the long hills, the cold days, and the sore joints. I needed that music. So it only made it that much worse when one of the ear pieces stopped working completely, leaving me with a 50/50 chance of whether I would be lucky enough to listen to vocals on any various track. Fight through it; it will be fine.
And then it happened. After listening to me whine about my problem that could have been solved easily if I had chosen to solve it myself, a student asked if I wanted to try out his Dr. Dre Beats headphones. Such a better option. Why solve it myself when others can solve it for me? Boom. Beats. Game time. But—-there were clearly two initial insecurities: 1) did I really need to blend in more with the students? 2) did I really want to run around town as if I were DJ Tiesto on holiday? I needed some time to think about it. I took the headphones for the time being and told the student that I would try them out the following morning before anybody had a chance to wake up. No judges; no insecurities; just me and not my headphones.
The sound hits you first. You have been transported to the shores of Ibiza at 5:30am. The sun is coming up on the ocean’s horizon, and the opening riff of U2's Where The Streets Have No Name is just audible above the noise of the crowd welcoming the morning’s early breezes to the after-party. Without your knowing, somebody has placed a small, yet powerful, subwoofer in your soul, and you can’t help but move to every. single. beat. You become susceptible to illusions: Passing car lights become pulsating strobes; morning mists become enhanced fog machines; you can no longer see your feet, and you can no longer feel much of anything: the world is now your dance floor, and nobody is watching. Welcome to Pure Bliss.
But it ends too quickly. You’re not ready for it to be over. Your body starts to ache long before your soul is ready to go home. You want to share this moment, this ecstasy. This is natural; we can all do this. You’ve never wanted to share your secret more. BEATS: Wear them and Dance. You want an audience, but the students have all gone home. You decide to take your moves to the gym in hopes that another faculty member might share in your transcendence.
So on a particularly cold morning, to escape the monotony of the treadmill, you put not-your-Beats on and march confidently over to your favorite flight of stairs just outside of the squash courts. You can do this. You know these stairs; you’ve trained on them before. And for the first five minutes, you move like you’ve always moved: every step/every other step/high knees/butt kicks; nothing fancy, just getting warmed up. Then the Beats start nudging your soul; you know this feeling; you’ve felt it before, just never this charged. They want more from you. They saw you dance the other morning. Why not now? The internal subwoofer switches on, and there. you. go. Now you’re dancing. No more baby steps. Every single step is in rhythm. And just as you feel as if you’ve conquered your fears, the world is your club, and you can dance anywhere, anytime, no questions asked, you reach the top of the stairs in a triumphant blaze of glory, you put your hands up to celebrate this victory over the self, you turn around to come back down, and there. they. are.
The girls’ basketball team has not actually left for vacation yet, and they need to get up the stairs.
But they also need to gauge what the dancing faculty member will do next. You pause. Because you, too, need to gauge what the dancing faculty member will do next.
Perhaps he will run far away and never come back. He tried; he failed. Dancing is discouraged in public. Perhaps he will deliberately fall down the stairs shifting the focus away from his dancing to his inevitable injury. Nothing funny about that; case closed. Or perhaps he will recognize, almost instantaneously, that these young athletes need these moments of stability and confidence: we know our coaches preach it, but are they actually able to dance like nobody’s watching?
Without hesitation, I chose to dance back down the stairs with a massive, unashamed smile on my face. And out of the corner of my eye, I saw a few of them imitating my dance moves going up the stairs. You may suggest that they were mocking me, and I humbly would accept such a fate, but I firmly believe they were taking dance lessons.
Keep dancing, and never be ashamed of doing so. Nobody ever walked into a gym who didn’t want to get better at something.
