Hey there!
I started something new last week. Not a new writing project—those are all underway…!—but a new class.
Tap dance.
That’s right. With a pair of borrowed shoes and a community center bargain of a price, I am now stepping and shuffling, doing a Spank Step, adding a Crunch Roll. Cool.
Tap dance is a percussive art, with aspects of a music class coupled with a damn good workout. We started out by tapping single notes, long and short, counting them out, using the names of fruit: Pear. Boom. Pear. One note, one step, the front of the shoe. Simple.
Then: Ap-ple. Two notes, faster. Ap-ple. Then we picked up speed: Pine-ap-ple. Pine-ap-ple…Pom-e-gran-ate-Pom-e-gran-ate-Pom-e-gran-ate! Whew!
You get the picture.
The class was called Absolute Beginners. One of the first things I learned, though, is that most people there, ranging from twenty-year-olds to possible grandfathers, grandmothers, had taken the class maybe as many as eight times already. They’re rightfully obsessed! :) I was one of only two actual absolute beginners, and the second didn’t show up for the second week. I am now the only absolute beginner in attendance. Still, the class is called Absolute Beginners…
I get it. Decades back, when Bikram’s now famous or infamous Hot Yoga was new to Portland—before the founder’s major sex scandal— I went to hot yoga classes daily for years. For anyone who hasn’t taken it on, in that particular brand of yoga everyone works through the exact same twenty-six poses in the same order over and over again, each class. The room is heated to a blasting, sweat inducing 104 degrees. In the classes I took, we were all beginners, forever. The teacher claimed to be a beginner. I did the same twenty-six poses over and over again for years, until I stood an inch taller, and was still a beginner and that was a lesson in itself. It was an exercise in what is called “Beginner’s Mind.”
In Zen Buddhism, as I understand it, Beginner’s Mind, or Shoshin, is the gift of ongoing openness—open to learning, open to experiencing life. It takes work to stay a beginner. Once you start learning, you start to imagine you know, and doors close…The word “sophomore,” of course, is made up of two Greek words—sophos and moros—which come together to mean something along the lines of “wise fool,” or a person who knows only enough to forget how much they don’t know. We all run the risk of living as sophomores, forever, unless we can step back into beginner’s mind.
Taking a tap dance class put me in beginner’s mind, for sure. Though the movements themselves weren’t exhausting, the arc of learning in that first hour was intense. There’s a wide range between being able to replicate the moves or remember a sequence, and being able to do it all well, with the mystery and magic of our instructor, a woman who said she’d been tap dancing for over fifty years, whose feet moved seemingly slightly while entire rhythmic moods filled the space.
After class, as I switched back into my street shoes, I thought of students who have signed up for my writing workshops, some with experience and others coming only with enthusiasm and a willingness to share their work, their words, their deepest, sweetest, scariest secrets. There’s an aspect of risk to all of it.
People can be so very brave, it’s amazing.
Glossophobia is the fear of public speaking. Supposedly more people fear public speaking than death. Writing is a particular kind of public speaking, I’d say—words on the page, reading out loud in workshop, eventual publication as an act of making the work public. Some people view public speaking as death itself, a social death, death by humiliation. It can be that scary, to consider sharing one’s words. Writers are a particular kind of brave. I am grateful for that kind of bravery, keeping us all in touch with layers of humanity. Thank you, writers, readers, dwelling in the world of ideas and emotions.
I took the writing risk for the first time maybe thirty years ago, and I’m still taking it. As a writer, I stay in Beginner’s Mind. Every piece is new. Sure, I’ve gained a body of knowledge, I’ve read widely and been in conversation with knockout authors about craft and values. Still, the urge to write is the impulse to try again, to make sense of out of ideas and moments, against the grand backdrop of human history, in all failures and idealism.
It’s scary and it’s safe and like engagement with the arts of all kinds, so very rewarding.
Sometimes, maybe we think it’s easier to allow ourselves to make mistakes when we’re younger…but does anyone remember, say…seventh grade? That shit was not easier! Ha! Reading a report in front of a classroom in a seventh-grade body, armed with a child’s body of knowledge and the high hopes of love and acceptance, was an exercise in humiliation, as I saw it. Now, in my fifties, rudimentary tap dancing in front of strangers might sound like a bit of a strange dream, but it’s really no problem at all. I’m okay with beginner’s mind. The risk is worth the reward, and the reward is a bit of a dancer’s high, dance room mirrors be dammed.
Sometimes I think humans are afraid of being human, together.
Anyway, I’m here, always learning, always working, always writing. I get it, I know it can be risky to take on new dreams or pursue longstanding passions. Still, I’m all for it. Now is the time, right? There is no other.
I appreciate you.
M
Beauty
Bravo! 👏👏👏