Наталия
It was a cold Tuesday evening on the campus. The students were either refugeed in the library or huddled around an electric heater home where the central heating hasn’t been turned on yet. If you had no business on campus, and no exams tomorrow you went home.
Тhat is when the salsa dancing social night was. What a perfect day to put it. Monday people are just managing to get by and have no time for party and pretty much every other day they have to work and then there is Friday and Saturday when you can go out, but then everyone is out also so it becomes a crowded place. And they say the wisdom of crowds….
I used to think that Thursdays were the best nights out. But lately, since my dance lessons started I am starting to feel like Tuesdays are pretty good too. Let me tell you about this one Tuesday (today really ;) when I met this wonderful young blonde girl who taught me everything about life and everything else in two sentences.
She said “relax” several times, while we were dancing and also showed me what Salsa is supposed to be like. Smooth, quick steps with sufficient weight transfer (not much though).
The second thing she said was that I should “do the step”, as in really lift the leg and bend the knee. Until then I was doing wing chun like steps keeping my soles very near the floor in order to “mask” my movement and make it more swift. Apparently in dance you want to show that stepping motion.
There I am on the dance floor with this beautiful girl. She moves so smooth and in rhythm with the beat that you can feel the music. She shows me once, shows me twice, realizes that she is dealing with a beginner and immediately there was a change of roles that happened between us. She looked a bit disappointed in me, perhaps assuming that the well built tall Eastern European guy is likely to be a good dancer. She was able to read me immediately after we went to the dance floor. I went into category “strong static type” — people who have lots of muscles, but no general notion of motion.
Only later did she realize that I had also martial arts aspiration which train you to do short fast steps and not smooth aesthetic movements. Any normal girl would be like, OK let’s sit this through and in at most 5 mins this will be over. Not for Natalia. That was her name. She kicked into “teacher mode”.
Noticing that — or should I say following her lead — I switched into student mode and the lesson began.
She moves and she moves. I try to move. Clumsy. Slow. Late. Then I move for a bit. And the first comment comes.
“You have to step more”, she says coming closer to me.
We try a turn and the timing is awkward. I think I was pulling her hand too much or trying to twist her.
“Just turn like a little halo on top of an angel head” , he corrects me. I try to keep my hand closer this time.
We dance some more. After some time she starts to notice that the ~100kg of person in front of her is moving like a brick. Everything is essentially one block with hands and legs moving a bit, but the whole body is kind of moving stiffly.
She looks at me she says: “Relax!”.
This simple one word sentence means everything to me.
What does the left brain do better? Rational thought and click-click-click style comparison/categorization. All this rational thought brings about bodily stiffness. But bodily stiffness is just like mental stiffness. This has been my problem for so long. And there she comes and tells me the solution.
Relax now. Relax in your social life. Relax in your academic life. Relax in you career life. Relax in your startup ideas life. Relax when you are out of time for the assignment. Relax while you are doing wing chun. Relax while you are picking up girls. Relax while you are waiting in line at the cash next to that hot tall girl. Relax while you dance.
Relax and be smooth.