Dance

I thought it might be fun (I use this word loosely) to take you on a sampling of a week in the life of me:

Sunday: Reading Ishmael by Daniel Quinn and feeling overwhelmed by this knowingness that the only thing that is going to save us from extinction is a fundamental shift in worldview. 

Monday: Still feeling overwhelmed if not a bit helpless about the state of humanity and therefore not overly excited to face and rally my students with a sense of hope. I get through it.

Tuesday: Still not feeling it. My daily A Course in Miracles lesson pisses me off, because I feel that the way that the lesson is stated is counterproductive if not just off altogether relative to how I am understanding our predicament. My brain races into thoughts that I should just give it all up… teaching, blogging, fighting in any way whatsoever. I’m sure that’s what all of the wisdom traditions would have me do- stop fighting. Then right off the bat as I walk into school a student chases me down with begging questions. You know- the big questions… about life. Actually, he is not one of my students. Yet as many students have, he heard about me and sat in on one of my classes in which we work on this very issue of shifting our worldview. He desperately wanted to talk to me about Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, and such. O.K., God. Fine. I’ll talk. And talk we did for a good half hour, right there at the top of the stairs, about the depths of life. Then I immediately got thrown into a grand opening in which we all pretended that our new fabrication center is fully functional when it is far from. My heart breaks every time I have to face how severely we underserve students who have been underserved their entire lives. Yet the day ends on a high note as my students, Shannon and I meet with a passive house builder who is interested in helping us to implement our net zero home for low-income communities in Houston.

Wednesday: A meme with a dancing 3 year old girl makes me smile deeply and warms my heart.

Thursday: First thing when I get to school I check what the discussion is that day for my class. It’s evolution day. Uh-oh! I have to get my game on. This is always one of the most animated days in class. It was awesome. I absolutely love giving students permission to say what they really think, to talk it out with them, and to watch light bulbs going off when they begin to understand that there are different ways to see things than how they have been presented to us in the past. From there I walked into a major review for my design studio. It was a fairly large fail for my students- they aren’t where they should be. Five years ago I would have blown a gasket. Not now. Instead, the outside reviewer (who happens to be a close friend and ally) and I, turned it into a perfect failure… the kind that leaves the students understanding what they can really do and what impact they will have because of it. It was awesome. My day ends with a meme of a dancing 5 year old girl that makes me smile deeply and warms my heart. 

Friday: It’s a full day on the run, doing my dance in the world. The first meeting of the day is in town to work with the City and potential community partners to bring that net zero, low income housing to fruition. Then it’s a race across town for a meeting with my client and the contractor for a building I am working on. Yes, I still have my own architectural practice in the midst of all of this. The day ends with me swearing in Houston traffic as I am trying to get to Shannon and Sara, the goalie mentioned in my “Friendship Guide” post, who was here visiting for a few days. A tasty dinner and good company settled me down. 

Saturday: I’m tired, but Shannon and Sara convince me to go to the rock climbing gym with them nonetheless. Something about struggling my way up the wall makes me feel like I can do it, whatever it is.

I could go into more depth about any one of these things or any of the million other things that crossed my radar and provoked me this week, but you know what I am going to choose today? Dance! Because sometimes in life, you just have to dance. So just for fun, this is going to be my history of dance. I mean specifically the history of me dancing.

As a young girl, you would not have caught me boldly dancing with abandon in front of a camera, or in front of anybody for that matter. I was a shy kid. Being the center of attention was not, and is still not, my thing. Of course these days I am at the center quite a lot- teaching, public speaking, running meetings, managing projects, etc.- and I am fortunately at ease there, but that took a lot of practice. You might imagine that not wanting to be the center of attention was a bit of a problem for a gymnast. It was. Gymnastics forced me to start facing my shyness early on. It forced me to start dancing, in public. I hated that part of it. I hated competing in general for the same reason. The way that I dealt with it was to just get through it… with as little motion or expression as was physically possible. It was like saying to the judges and spectators, “We all know that I have to do this routine, so I am just going to do it in the least interesting way possible so that you either won’t watch or maybe will only watch with complete disinterest.” That worked pretty well for me. I mean it worked well for the outcome I was after. It did not produce good scores!

In the meantime, when I was alone and sure that nobody was watching, I would ham it up. The truth was that I rather enjoyed moving my body (still do). I just didn’t like people watching me move my body (still don’t). My mom would occasionally catch me and with complete exasperation exclaim, “Why don’t you do that at the gym???!!!” But I just couldn’t. I was so bad at the expressive side of gymnastics that my mom signed me up for real ballet lessons. Gymnasts do a certain amount of dance lessons within the context of their training, but that clearly wasn’t working for me. So she took me to a retired ballerino from the Houston Ballet. Because I did have some skills from gymnastics, I was put into a class of actual aspiring ballerinas. Yikes. One day this danseur noble was teaching us a new sequence. Somewhere in my focus on just trying to get it right so that I didn’t stick out, I lost myself in it. Then suddenly, I caught him out of the corner of my eye excitingly waving his arms in the air. Then I noticed the most frightening thing ever- everyone else had stopped dancing and they were staring at me. He was waving his arms at me. I was mortified. I immediately froze. That prompted him to put his hands on his head and exclaim, “Why did you stop???? You were the only one doing it right!!!” Oh. Who knew???

Nobody knew for a very long time. Except for perhaps my mom, that is. She would tell my coaches, but they certainly did not believe her. While the ballet lessons were phased out, dance lessons continued in the gym. My favorite was from a jazz dancer. She introduced us to isolations, in which you isolate each part of your body so that you can move it independently and with a greater range of motion. It is challenging. I was intrigued. I spent quite a lot of time practicing those isolations at home in front of the mirror. Of course nobody knew that, because they never saw me use my newfound freedom of movement. That is, not until one fateful day…

It was summer and time to have our new floor routines choreographed. The year was 1984. I was fourteen. Step one is picking the music. My music had always been the most conservative (stiff) thing that we could come up with. We had again found just such an option for me. Yet in the privacy of my own room I had fallen in love with the basketball theme music for the LA Olympics. It was jazzy. Quite. It resonated with me so much that I did something crazy. I took it to my coach and asked him if I could use it. He looked at me like I was nuts. But something in me wasn’t going to back off. He finally agreed that we would cut two options for my music and let the choreographer decide which to use. I agreed with that plan.

We had taken a team trip to Austin to work with this really good choreographer. It was an all day affair with each of us waiting in the lobby of the gym while she worked with us one at a time. It was finally my turn. I felt her sizing me up as I walked across the empty gym to meet her and my coach at the floor. As I arrived she looked me over one more time for good measure. My coach explained to her the situation and steered her toward the conservative music. She listened to both and then without hesitation stepped onto the floor and said “Do this.” It was a tuck jump to straddle landing followed by a knee and shoulder shimmy thingy. Shit. What had I done? She knew. She had my number and she wasn’t about to let me off of the hook. There was only one thing I could do. I obliged. Perfectly. Her response: “Thought so. We are going with the jazzy music.” Then she proceeded to choreograph what was a very jazzy routine for that day and age, as my coach watched in complete bewilderment.

Unfortunately I never got to compete that routine. I never got to that moment of revealing what I had been hiding all along. I blew out my knee instead, effectively ending my career. But I never stopped loving to dance. No one ever suspects it. On the rare occasion that someone gets to see me really move, shock is always the response. Here is a fun little case in point. I was pretty straight laced when I started college. I had never been the partying type. So much so that I didn’t drink much or go out very early on in my college career. My freshman year I mostly only went to hockey team social functions. At one such event, for whatever reason, the music moved me to dance. Hip hop was our music of choice. Shocked, one of my teammates blurted out what became my (primary) hockey nickname: Shellmaster Flash. It was like my secret super hero identity, the superman to my Clark Kent. My super power: dancing. It was fitting and it stuck. This past summer Grandmaster Flash played the Princeton reunions. Alls I am saying is, me and my namesake resonated. He could see me and he knew. At the end we gave each other a high ten and embraced our fingers for an extended moment of mutual appreciation. Sometimes, people, you just have to dance.