Dance
I love to dance. Where we live in Marlborough, we have a deck that overlooks the sea and very little else. When friends come to visit, we throw open the doors, queue all of our favourite songs, turn the music up loud, and dance under the stars, lit by the moon. We are stardust!
Do you have a song that you simply cannot resist moving to? For me, it is Sandstorm by Darude. And the performance of this by Synthony is magical. I want to be the conductor with the blond hair, the perfect rhythm and the joy of the moment.
We danced a lot over Christmas and into the new year. And I find myself wondering whether dancing might not be a rather evocative way to describe my life as a whole. The ebb and flow of giving and receiving, the ins and outs of friendships, the ups and downs of faith, the spins and steps of unfolding the day, keeping balance, not losing rhythm, seeking that same joy of a life that is not perfect but that is, nonetheless, full of hopes and dreams, light and promise.
Even when someone captures your moves, and you realise that you don’t dance as well as you thought you did, and the image in your head of how you think you look does not match the reality of what you are shown on the reel, you don’t need to stop dancing.
Please don’t stop dancing.
Practise in front of a mirror, sign up for lessons, plan some steps, find a partner, do what you need to do to hear the music. You might have to listen carefully, you might have to listen hard, you might need to find a pocket of silence to catch the notes again, but it will be there.
Some days you will be as steady as a waltz. Some days may trip like a foxtrot. Some days are as complex and fast as a jive. Some might be as smooth as John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. Others may be as crazy as Beyonce in love. Perhaps they will have no rules at all, and the dissonance of Sabotage will scatter starships. There is the quickstep for when intuition pulls, and you move fast so that you can’t talk yourself out of something instinctive and defiant of logic. And then there is the cost. That every step you take has a cost, every choice for one dance means that you aren’t dancing another… Is there a dance that practises a pause when it is important that this time you don’t rush in without taking a breath and seeing the different ways ahead, knowing that you probably can’t have them all? Or is that the moment before you begin, when you choose the dance and who you are going to dance with? I’m learning, too, to embrace my dance card. It would be rude not to. Every dance has something to leave to you, every dancer can say thank you.
At the moment, my life is pretty close to Sandstorm. I have so many plans for this year, plans to travel, plans to be self-employed, plans to write, plans to connect, plans to create… plans that I am going to run for, that I am all-in for, that I am going to dance as hard as I can for.
Because I can’t resist moving, I am following The Conductor with the perfect rhythm and the joy of the moment, and my husband gave me disco lights for Christmas.
