Life Lessons

I am thinking this morning of the smash and fractions we leave behind, of the contradictions we provoke, of the black clouds we send up over our own heads. I think of the comments we make in a moment of hurry or exhaustion, the tossed-off observations, the words we use to delineate one thing from the other, to set one thing to the side of another, at the awful expense of that other. These things echo; they reverberate. We don't see the ramifications coming, but they will come: you wait, they'll be there. There is nothing we can do to scrub the thing we might not have said, the hurt we should have never inflicted, from our record. We can apologize, and we do. But we can't retreat to the before.

Lately I have been taking dance lessons from a choreographer who, in so many ways, silences the negative. You doubt yourself, and he asks you not to. You hear yourself making some ironic observation, and it goes strictly unacknowledged. You ask him a question and you discover, in his answer, no manipulation, no deceit, no cunning. You make a mistake, and he does not shame you. The lesson isn't soft, the learning is relentless, the stakes keep getting higher—and yet: the negative doesn't enter in. Nothing is gained at the expense of something else. There is, quite simply, gain.

The best teachers teach us more about life than they do about anything else. They give us the chance to be slightly better people. Taking ballroom dance lessons is a self-indulgence of the highest order. But oh, I still have so much to learn. And oh, I am so desperate to get some part of this living right.