I Miss Dancing

Anyone on Facebook probably knows about the memories or "on this day" thing, right?  You click on it and it shows you everything you posted on this day in years past.  It's kind of fun.  It makes me a little sad though because up until 5 or 4 years ago, 90% of what I posted had to do with dancing.

I loved dancing.

I still love dancing, but I haven't done it in a really long time.

I'm not talking about just dancing around the house while listening to music (I do that often) or going out to a club and shaking your booty to music.  The dancing I love and miss is Lindy-Hop and, to a slightly lesser extent Blues.

There was a time when I was dancing one or the other of those two styles of dance 3-4 nights a week.  I don't think I can put in to words what dancing meant to me.  It was so life affirming.  It was just... movement and music energy and magic.  It doesn't fit in to words.

Besides that, dancing was something I did entirely for myself.  I started dancing regularly after the end of a relationship that had lose my sense of self.  As part of getting myself back, I (bravely) went to a dance event alone and took the lesson and fell in love.

I pretty much stopped dancing when I started grad school; I just didn't have time. And of course, by the time I graduated, I couldn't really breathe.  The rest is pretty much recorded here on this blog.

Now that I'm feeling a little better, is it time to dance again?  There's a couple places I know of tonight that have blues jams.  I could go and listen to the music and dance.  I would probably have fun.

I can tell you right now that I wont go.

I still can't breathe, really.  I'm so out of shape.  I feel like I've lost my grace; I can't make my body move the way I want it to.  Plus today (and most of last week) I have tendonitis in my foot, so dancing would be really painful.  Also, if I go to a blues jam, it will go late and I'll get to bed late and then be tired tomorrow.

There's part of me that knows all this is just a list of lame excuses (except maybe the foot thing).  If I just went, I could at least dance the slow songs, and I would have fun.  But there's a very strong possibility that I will be incredibly disappointed.  It's going to be so hard to go back to dancing and not be as good as I used to be.

I need to lose some weight and build up some muscle and cardio strength before I'm going to feel comfortable showing my face at a dance.  I can let my longing for my dancing days do one of two things: it can make me wallow in sadness and nostalgia, or it can give me something to work toward.  I'm going to make it the latter.

I promise, I'm going to go dancing before the end of the year.