I am not coordinated. One time, in third grade, I was required to be the goalie in a P.E. class soccer match. I kicked the ball once and was so excited about the fact that my foot had made contact that I didn’t realize the ball had flown into my own net. That is, until the kids on the other team started thanking me for winning the game for them.
I’m not telling this story to prove that elementary school kids are mean. Everyone knows that already. I’m telling this story because it summarizes all of the interactions I’ve ever had with physical activity. I run occasionally now, and that is only possible because I have had 20 years of practice. For everyone’s benefit, including my own, I stay away from sports that involve other people.
Since I’ve come to college, though, it hasn’t always been easy to avoid situations in which I need to move my arms and legs at the same time. As it turns out, people in college actually dance sometimes. At high school shindigs, I could almost always get away with standing near the snack bowls. College parties don’t provide me with the same option. I learned quickly that no one wants to have a conversation at a Top 40 party. I had no choice. I had to start dancing. And at first, it was ugly.
My dance moves have notoriously consisted of extending my arms forward alternately at roughly a 120-degree angle. Sometimes I would throw in a leg or hip jerk of some sort, but never at the right times. Just to clarify, this is not for lack of rhythm. I’ve played the trombone for eight years. Keeping beat is essentially all I am good for. I had just never learned to move.
However, I’ve realized now that the worst part was never my jarring lack of syncopation, however difficult this may be to believe. Every time I peered around the room to see who was watching my defeat, I became a little less pleasant to look at. If there’s anything I’ve learned in college, it’s the fact that negativity is like yawning. Not only do the people around you start to yawn as well; they begin to wonder why they didn’t realize how tired they were in the first place. My discomfort was contagious. If I sound like a bummer, it’s because I was one. But I’m working on it.
Dancing well takes confidence, skill, practice, and a lot of other things. I will probably never dance well. But dancing doesn’t need to be done well to be fun. It turns out that your body does some great things when you stop thinking about it so much. I’ve always admired dancers for making their exertion look effortless. Dancing depends largely on being able to use the body to express itself in ways that nothing else could. That’s what people talk about when they talk about feeling the music. Maybe I’ll never be articulate at it. I’ll never dance in a performance, and I freeze up if there’s real attention on me. For my purposes, though, being able to go out and relax is more than enough.
I’ve started dabbling in zumba. I like it because it doesn’t give me a lot of autonomy concerning my moves, so I get to work on style. I also like it because it burns calories. I still start on the wrong foot without fail, but sometimes I honestly feel like I’m doing some maneuvers decently nowadays, which is an improvement. I’ve started to develop a sense of the right place to put my limbs. When that sense agrees with what I actually do, it’s a pretty awesome feeling. The more I’ve used my body, the more I’ve appreciated what it can do for me and the more I’ve learned to trust it. This applies not just to dancing, but also to all physical activity. It’s a positive feedback loop, and once you get started, it’s hard to not want to keep going. For the longest time, I avoided dancing, and complex movement in general, out of fear that people would watch me fail, but no one pays that much attention. Whether you’re in a zumba class or at an Eclectic party, I’ve come to see that no one is really concerned with what you’re doing. Everyone’s too busy with themselves to worry about your awkward extremity movement. I’ve learned to use that freedom to my advantage.
I’ve been throwing around the idea of establishing a dance workshop for very bad dancers like myself, the kinds of people who need to work at a snail’s pace if they’re going to learn anything motion-related. Until I get that plan off the ground, the moral of the story is this: you should dance. Even if you’re awkward, you should dance. Even if you do your best work in your room with the blinds down and your roommate away, you should dance.
And if you see me busting one of my signature moves next weekend, you should probably stay out of my way.