It happens at the gym a lot. My trainer, JT, will grab some free weights, or a cable pull or a medicine ball and say “Okay, we’re going to do this,” and demonstrate that I’m to say, curl the 12-pound free-weights to my shoulders, then twist them in a tricky- trick move and lift them over my head, then reverse the order of the moves and bring them down. Then he hands the weights over to me, and I do exactly the wrong thing.
“Stop!” JT exclaims. “What are you doing?? You just watched me do this.” He shakes his head, incredulous. “I saw you watch me.”
And I have to admit that yes, I was watching, but I was thinking about something else. Oops.
I think this may be the source of my math deficiencies as well. This is also why I’m pretty terrible at grammar, punctuation, and resetting the car clock. The minute the explanation starts, I look present, but I’m actually wondering what would happen if, say, the earth stopped rotating. Do all heavenly bodies spin? Is every heavenly body round?
Practicing presence is part of why I signed up for Latin dancing. And because I love to dance and didn’t do enough of it in my youth when it would not have looked silly or alarming even.
When you marry five days after graduating from college, there isn’t the dancing there might have been.
It is too late to have lived on my own in my twenties, pursued an acting career in New York, or taken songwriting seriously and tried to make a career of it. I’ve habitually chosen the weight of responsibility over play and although it pains me to admit this, probably felt morally superior for doing so. I passed go without stopping on the race from college to adulthood.
But maybe I could still dance.
After the first few lessons, I realized everyone else had come with a friend. I felt a little lingery—like I was subtly orbiting chatting friends coupled here and there between sets, or when we stopped to grab water. Being on the outside felt familiar. Good God, maybe I pride myself on this, too. Could that be true?
But it was okay—because music is a great connector and Nancy, our instructor, was a joy magnet. A professional choreographer in Puerto Rico, she understood we had the retention of kindergartners as we struggled to learn to salsa, mambo, cha-cha, and to rotate our hips with the smoothness of hula dancers.
So, Thursday was our last lesson for this session. I arrived about three minutes late to discover everyone else wearing flowers in their hair and red-fringed shawls tied around their hips at a saucy angle over black leggings. Apparently, I hadn’t gotten the memo, not having any friends in the class to have alerted me to the plan.
But within minutes, the music took over, and Nancy had us working hard, rehearsing all eight dances we had learned, which we were going to perform straight through, while being videoed. For what purpose other than extortion, I can’t imagine.
I tried my best, without a flower, without a red shawl, to get it all right—the moves, the order. And the music got louder, and the buzz got buzzier. And suddenly we were in a circle, with Nancy thrusting us into the center one at a time to move in whatever way our souls inspired us.
I cringed as she pointed at me. For a moment, I was at Northeast High School in a line dance, where, totally on your own, you had to dance your way down the center of two parallel lines of other kids grooving in place just being cool.
But guess what? When you have waited all your life to dance with abandon, when the stakes are low because you are surrounded by only goodwill, when happy people are laughing and yelling, “Shake it,” for the first time ever, you enter the circle you have lived just outside your whole life.
There is only that moment, and you are present for it. You laugh, and you don’t care, and for just a second your moves are awesome, and you wish you could do it all over again, because you got it all wrong—the divine covenant was not work. How could I not have understood? It was joy.
There is always music playing at the gym. It makes hefting medicine balls, doing pushups, and doing planks a little bit easier. I tell JT he should offer dance classes. He makes a move in response that is effortlessly cool and simultaneously funny. He’s a natural.
On the sound system, Taylor Swift is singing “I Knew You Were Trouble,” so I laugh and make a move, too. I’ve got some now.
He reaches out, and fully present, I hand back the weight of the world.
