Swaggerville journal 2/6 - Salsa

So you think you can dance?

I'm okay with dancing. What stymies me it's when I have steps to perform. Being told "Do this, at this time" frustrates and confuses me. Either way, I still want to figure out out, and for step 1 of that process, I took salsa lessons.

In college, I tried some ballroom dancing with varied amounts of success. I haven't tried it since. When someone brought up salsa lessons on one of the law school Facebook pages, I decided I'd try again. Last night, after work, I biked over and took a beginner lesson.

I enjoyed doing the lessons. I learned the basic step and then how to do a turn. There was another step that I was taught, but I couldn't figure it out. Either way, I enjoyed it and felt accomplished for my first time trying it out. Then they let us dance on our own.

Yesterday, I told a story seeing how much of a shy introvert I was in high school. Things haven't changed that much. Asking people to dance, even at a salsa dance class where everyone is there to dance, is difficult for me. Another actual problem there was that I had a limited set of moves that I could do, so things got boring quickly, since i'm expected to lead and all I have are 2 moves and one of them is rhythmic walking.

On the other hand, I enjoyed watching other more experienced people do it. While I was doing single-digit addition on the dance floor, they were doing calculus. I think that's how people who give lessons get you to come back. At first, you're frustrated. Learning to dance is difficult and the rewards are incremental. But then, when you see what other dancers can do, you come back for more incremental rewards until, in theory, you're as good as those dancers.

Now is the part where I'm I'm supposed to have a clean ending. I say whether I'll go back. I talk about some valuable lesson that I received. Unfortunately, I have none of that available at the moment. It was nice to go and maybe I'll do it again at some point. Until then, I'll just have to settle for practicing steps like Richard Gere in "Shall we Dance."