I don’t often get to go to my 9-year-old daughter’s ballet class with her. I’m usually in the office at that time. But last week I was able to go. When I got there, in a room full of chittering girls, she said, “Come dance with us daddy!” And her teacher quickly chimed in “Yes, join us!”
Sometimes the distance from a normal life to an extraordinary one is just a few steps. “Normal” would be to nervously chuckle in response to the invitation and find a chair on the side with the other parents only to vicariously experience my child’s nimble strides and perhaps indulge a private conceit that she is the best one of them all.
But this day I didn’t choose “normal.” Feeling like a lost elephant traipsing among graceful gazelles I made my way through classical foot positions, pliés and relevés and jetés across the broad wooden floor. In minutes I was so focused on the teacher and the practice that I forgot I wasn’t just a normal part of the class, except for the occasional glimpse I caught of some middle-age balding guy in the mirror.
The little encouragement we all got (hopefully) from our mother when she told us “You can be anything you want to be” comes with an expiration date. When my next birthday comes I’ll cross the half-century mark with the realization that there are a lot of things I might have been; Olympic athlete, a rock star or maybe even a ballet dancer. But from this point in my life it looks unlikely.
At the ballet class a mother sitting with her boys while they watched their sister dance commented to her sons, “Do you think your father would ever do that?” to which they responded, “No way!” Kind of sad actually. We each have such a short time to live that a denial of the richness of any experience is nearly a denial of life itself. We have all live in “virtuality” to some degree. The constant media immersion makes us sometimes forget the difference between a real life and a vicarious life. We risk becoming so used to watching life that we forget to actually experience it. As Lee Ann Womack so beautifully wrote, “And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance… I hope you dance”
Yes, my thighs and feet were sore the next day, but a happy kind of sore.