Friday, May 24, 2013

Newton's Third Law {of Dancing}

You know the law I'm talking about, don't you? The one that says, "For every action {a man makes} there is an equal and opposite reaction {from the woman}. 

You know: He pushes you out and you twirl around. He moves backward and you move forward. He leads and you follow. He dips you over the edge of the dance floor and you love it and beg for more. Oh, wait a minute...

I have always loved music. Not as much as some - I mean, I didn't make a living out of it - but it has always been an integral part of my life. But (and maybe this is why I'm not a professional) music by itself has never been enough for me. It's too much of a one-dimensional experience. I need to be an active participant with music. Singing along brings it much more to life. And now that I've "discovered" dancing...well, now it's become three-dimensional. 
About two months ago I went on a {second} date to Cowboys, a local country bar. I was a bit trepidatious about it. I didn't really know what I was doing (the last time I was at Cowboys was about 20 years ago) and, prior to stepping on the dance floor, let my date know he might end up with sore toes.
Well, the guy and I didn’t end up working out (I think I DID step on his toes too much), but my relationship with Cowboys sure has. The next weekend I hit up a friend who has been going every weekend for years and asked if I could tag along. He introduced me to others and soon I was learning the two-step, three-step, cha-cha, and getting out on the dance floor to learn line dances - though it meant looking silly for a while and bumping into people (hey, sometimes you gotta just jump in with both feet and sink or swim). Now I have some regular guys I dance with, though I rarely turn down anyone who asks, because you learn more if you’re not dancing with the same person/few people all the time.  Last weekend I don’t think I sat out more than a few dances. For five hours.

With my good friend, Butch.



I have always loved to dance. Like a lot of girls, I was in ballet at a young age - and still regret that my parents didn’t put me back in it when we moved to Colorado when I was six. I took ballroom dancing lessons with my ex one year. That ended up like a lot of things in our relationship – canoeing, for example - where each person has a counter-action to the other and that’s what makes it work. We didn't do the give-and-take of life very well together. So, despite my love for dance, it never gelled. Until recently.
I find no small amount of irony in the fact that I lived in Texas for eight years, but I had to move back to Colorado to start listening to country music or buy my first {ever!} pair of boots. Look at the bottoms of my boots after just three nights of dancing. Showing the wear and tear of having fun!

Country music has taken me to a place - musically speaking - I would never have gone a couple years ago. Of course, a lot has happened over the last two years (two years ago this month, in fact), that I never would have imagined two years before that. It kind of makes me wonder who I'll be two years from now.

The thought is daunting and thrilling at the same time - another Third Law example.

Lesson Learned: Dancing produces nothing tangible. There is nothing I get to take home at the end of the night. Almost immediately the physical feeling begins to fade, leaving nothing but recall to remind me of the movement in my toes, my hips, my head. Although it is a 3-D expericence, it is still abstract.Yet every time I dance, I leave feeling more alive, and it is a cumulative feeling, piling up and spilling over, affecting my outlook on every other aspect of life. Which, I guess, is the equal reaction - dancing giving life more dimension.

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