Can dancing give you whiplash?

Apparently, it can. My dance instructor kicked my butt yesterday. After learning a snazzy section of Fosse's choreography to "Sing, sing, sing," my entire body is aching. Well, not my entire body, just my neck (ahh, Fosse whiplash) and my legs--if only I could live in a world without stairs! The rest of me is exhausted, but feels a little leaner and meaner. I also found that I could bend and stretch more after 6 weeks of dance classes than I've been able to do since last summer, when I was doing movement 5 mornings a week.

There are certain activities, like dancing and singing, that I tend to abandon every time I get low on free time and money. Whenever I do pick them up again, I feel like I've woken up from a long, grey sleep, and the little girl that used to sing into her hairbrush while dancing around her bedroom shakes her head at my surprise at how easily these activities come back to me as if to say, "well...duh." The odd thing is that this cycle happens so frequently, I pretty much always feel as if I'm slipping into that sleep or shaking it off. You'd think I'd wise up and actually make the time and the money available to keep these activities in my life so I don't feel that way, but both can be so hard to come by sometimes.

What activity would you pick up again if you had an extra hour or two in your days and more dollars in the bank?

The road not considered

"Let's give it a try"

I don't think I say this phrase enough. I'm too used to being one step ahead of the conversation, to thinking of reasons why something might fail, why a course should be chosen or averted. I'm not always good at strategy (I'm very easy to beat in chess) but I am good at imagining results of certain decisions. Where I lack this insight especially, is visually. I watch HGTV in awe at the designers who can take an old barn and turn it into a palace. If you were to ask me to mark-off a 3-foot square on the floor I would probably end up with a 4.3-foot trapezoid. It's actually quite pathetic.

Last night, Andrew and I rearranged our living room to incorporate a newly-acquired dining table and four chairs. We started by talking about what we should do but, in a rare moment of personal insight, I said "I'm never going to know until I see it. Let's just try things out." The first attempt was the most difficult. We put a table here, the couch there, and it looked bad. Fortunately, we were ready to tackle the problem, so when Andrew suggested something else, I said "let's give it a try." I probably uttered that phrase more often last night than I have in the entire summer as we arranged and rearranged until we were satisfied (and the pizza came).

The result surprised me. Not only did we end up with a fantastic living and dining area, but that spirit of being willing to try pervaded the whole evening. We were more open-minded in our conversations, better listeners, better at trying to express something, failing, and trying something else.

So though Robert Frost may have taken the road less travelled by when they diverged in that yellow wood, I like to imagine that, were I walking with Andrew, he might suggest going off the path entirely, and that I might say "sure, let's give it a try."