Sticking With It

“You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive." - Merce Cunningham

I came across an article last week that talked about the neurological benefits of dancing. The medical evidence suggests that people who dance are less likely to have strokes, less likely to suffer from dementia, and less likely to have Alzheimer's disease advance rapidly. Evidently dancing stimulates brain activity in a massive way. Dancing tunes your brain and your body to listen for the melody at the same moment as you'd inspire a set of motor-skills to respond.

It wasn't the medical findings that surprised me so much as the whole slant of the article. When I'm dancing, really dancing I rarely consider my brain. In fact, that's part of the thrill. Feeling like there is a direct communication that occurs between my body and the music. The sensation that each moment, each movement happens in isolation without a sense of what comes next.

I've made a habit of dancing this year, actually. Turning on loud music or something soapy and sweet and letting myself move. I've been surprised to feel self-conscious or even awkward about it. At certain points in my life it was easy for me to slip into dancing. A particular curl to my toes was all it took. The music was optional. I'd dance where and whenever I felt like it. Muzak in the mall, dance clubs, wedding receptions, various messy apartments in my twenties...

Maybe everyone shrinks a little from these things as we age. My life has a sense of permanence now. I don't wake up every morning or take up every moment as though everything before was nothing. The permanence of things will cling to me, even when there's a jazzy tune being played. My body has limits it didn't have. My life has features and relationships that stick. But dancing can still sort these things out, I just have to get past that initial sense of awkwardness.  But I've been pleased to find that both my life and my brain are malleable enough to respond once the music starts.