Day 197: Dance It The F*ck Out

Paris, Two Days Left. Aha. The Fear arrives. It's not that I've been waiting for it per se, but the feeling of 'Who do you think you are?' started niggling in my brain as soon as I posted about my balls-out-holy-effing-sheeeeeeet idea about coming here for a year to study. And today, with two days left and that horrible I-don't-wanna-go feeling filling my guts, The Fear is here.

Luckily, I have a magic bullet. It's called African dance class. And it's also called Buena Vista Social Club.

Because the thing I always forget is that fear isn't real. It feels real. Oh hell yes. But it isn't. There isn't ACTUALLY impending doom knocking on my door right now. Nah. Financial ruin is WEEKS away. Failure and embarrassment, at least a couple of months off yet. Dying cold and alone? Hell, that's not on deck for DECADES. We're good.

Yesterday, my Gospel friend Nancy told me about a swing dance accident she had a couple of years ago. Her husband lifted her in some crazy upside-down-over-his-head thing and she overshot it and pitched backwards behind him. She landed on her face, broke her nose and a vertebrae in her neck.

She told me that when she'd fallen, she lay there for a long moment, not moving and not wanting to move. She was aware of her husband and dance teacher freaking out around her, but she herself was perfectly calm.

There was good reason for their panic, of course. Nancy is four-foot-eight and over 50 years old.

But what struck me was her calm. Because this is exactly what happens when something goes horribly wrong. I remember this when I disassembled my right arm on a ski hill five years ago and three bones went three different directions. My arm was blown to shit, but I was calm, detached, observant.

I never snowboarded again.

But Nancy got right back out there. She didn't want the fall to be her last memory of acrobatic swing. And there's the lil' surfer girl who got her arm chomped off by a shark in Australia. She was back on her board in three weeks. Why? Because she loves to surf.

And hey, remember way back when I coined the MENTAL JUDO thing? How you take the energy of fear/anger/whatever and you kung fu that shit into something you can use?

Today, right now, that kung fu is dance. I stick on the Buena Vista Social Club CD and I salsa-fy it in the living room. Or I go to Le Marais, like I'm doing in fourteen seconds, and fill my boots with the most joy-filled dance form I know. I'm going to dance it the f*ck out and keep going because that's the kind of life I want to live and that's the person I want to be.