Dancing Lessons

I love to dance and I love to watch dancing. That's me before my dance recital in grade school. You can tell by the black and white photo how long my love of dancing has been going on. It didn't matter that my dance teacher told my mother she was wasting her money on my lessons or that my mother listened to her. Life was different than. If a teacher told a parent something like that, the parent rarely questioned. I lived with the image of me being uncoordinated for a long time.

As an adult occasionally someone told me I was a good dancer. I never believed them. In fact, all it did was make me think less of their opinion on anything else.

Then I met Sally and her husband Alex Tchassov and starting taking lessons with him four years ago. I don't think I'm uncoordinated anymore. I learned I can dance. But more than that I learned about life.

Alex is from Russia. He is passionate about dance and full of insight and the parallels of the movement to life. I kept notes. It's one of my things. I like to keep notes.

I took a look at those notes this morning as I sat down to write a blog about my favorite show , Dancing with the Stars. You see I'm one of those people who is bothered by Kate Goslin. I usually cheer on an underdog, but I can't with her. And I haven't been able to figure out why.

Then I read this, paraphrased from Alex without the Russian accent:

Dancing is like life, it throws us off balance and we struggle to keep that balance with grace. We can't stand there and demand our fun. We need to enjoy and dance with our heart and not our brain.

And I got what bothers me about her. Rather than surrender to her situation, she is not merely resisting, but choosing the role of the victim on and off the dance floor, playing to excuses she has no previous dance experience, begging for votes through tears and hoping we will all feel sorry for her.

I'm not one for victims. I'm for taking responsibility. Victims don't get my vote.

I don't expect Kate will last much longer. This is after all a dance competition and there are much better dancers in it. I only hope when she leaves she takes away more than a dance lesson. She learns what I was fortunate enough to learn from Alex. Life is a big dance. We can show up, give it our all, learn to enjoy it no matter what is served up and find out dancing with grace is alot easier than we had thought.