about dancin' - kind of

Dance like no-one is watching. Sing like no-one is listening. Love like you’ve never been hurt and live like it’s heaven on earth [?]

I was going to attribute this Mark Twain but there is no consensus on the world wide interweb, so I won’t take the risk. I often get sent these sentiments in one form or another, either on someone’s email signature, or in one of those email forwards which include funny pictures and will say wootwoo somewhere in it, exhorting me to send it to five fabulous women I love.

And this is a clumsy segue into what I really wanted to talk about and actually has little do with the above quote. Digressing much? Oh wells. I had to start with something. It was the first sentence in the quote which attracted me. “Dance like no-one is watching”. I do that you know – except I dance when no-one is actually watching, not counting the wide-eyed cat who I swear appreciates my moves, even joining in to wind herself around my seriously clumsy legs. Her trust is touching.

I am a lazy person. Exercise and I are merely nodding acquaintances from different neighbourhoods - not great mates at all. I have little desire to move my bulk beyond the necessary functions, and if I could get away with it, I would probably forgo even that. I can’t imagine exercising for fun, although I sometimes wonder what endorphins feel like. I admit to a faint fascination with running because there seems to be something so liberating about slipping on a pair of shoes and running away. Surprisingly I’ve even read books about running, and started a running program a few times, although I generally become unstuck around day 2 or 3 when I realize that there is actual discomfort and ugly gasping involved with moving 70 odd kilos of usually sedentary flesh. The one or two minutes of running (per 5 or 10 minutes of walking) is the stuff of nightmares and nothing like the beautiful effortless strides I see in the early morning runners on the street, who always seem strangely blank. Anyways I give up and sit on the couch and do things I’m good at like watching tv, reading, looking at facebook and listening to music.

And then comes along that piece of music. I can’t predict when or what it will be. It might be classical, or from the top 40. It doesn’t announce itself. It’s just there. I know it because all I know is the music and nothing else. And here’s the surprising bit. My muscles start twitching. My limbs are restless. I cannot sit. I must dance and dance I do. I stretch, I pirouette, I leap and jump, I shimmy, bump and grind; a grotesque combination of ballet, hiphop and moves I learnt at the grade 10 social circa 1985. I’m not a coordinated person and my flexibility is appalling, but it doesn’t matter. As long as it is only the music I feel with all my senses, I am Margot Fonteyn and Billy Elliott. I am somewhere else. My heart rate rises, I sweat, my muscles feel it. I am, in short, exercising. But if even for a second, I catch a glimpse of myself, or imagine what I must look like through someone else’s eyes, then it’s over. It’s just too laughable and a little bit tragic. The music fades, and I sit on the couch again. But it will come back. It always does.

"We're fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance" Japanese Proverb