Dancing

I was trained in ballet.  I have rhythm and I love to dance.  I went to every junior high and high school dance and danced to every song.  In high school I dated college boys who could get me into bars when live bands were playing Carolina beach music, popularized by the Drifters, the Tams and the Platters, and shagged the night away (not the British shag but a type of slowed down jitterbug traditional to the southeast U.S.).  When I am dancing, I experience the coming together of being and doing.  A union of body, mind and spirit, I am completely present in the moment with the music and interconnected with the other dancers (not just my partner).  Music and movement are as pure a therapy as there is.  Singing along adds another way to connect to the experience; voices mingling, so many senses engaged at the same time.  Hearing, the music, tasting the words in my mouth, seeing the joy others are expressing, touching a partner, the kinesthetic sense of where my body is in space and the interoception of all the signals from inside me, letts me know how dancing “feels” to me. 

I remain astounded that I married a man who wouldn’t dance.  Since then, my dancing happened with an aerobics instructor on the TV screen, the occasional wedding reception and blessedly annual nursing conferences.  Thanks to these professional organizations at least once a year, most years, I had the opportunity to get out on the dance floor.  The nursing profession is primarily filled with women dancing, like me, alone, but one with themselves and each other.  To dance together is to live and be living, an experience of being and doing of connection to myself and others. 

I do sometimes dance by myself, I ask Alexa to play an old Motown favorite or, of course, Taylor Swift and dance and sing around my kitchen, barefoot on the hardwood floor just like I did in high school gyms and let my creativity of movement flow.  After just one song, I feel better, more at peace, more grateful, more joyful and I have more energy.  My dancing looks different than it did 50 years ago in those gyms and bars, but it feels the same on the inside.  On the inside I am 17 again and I have found the fountain of youth.