Dancing Through Life: Lanterns Without a Flame

Over the last four months I have been taking private dance lessons.

Dancing is something I’ve always wanted to do; yet, have lacked the courage to try with any conviction. I hoped that I would meet someone who would learn alongside me, but the most consistent of things about past versions of me is that I at enter relationships with people who do not like me as a person or even the things I like. I say past, because I’ve spent the last five months learning how to experience healthy interpersonal relationships: if I wanted to be with someone who liked to dance than I should stop waiting for them to change my life.

We hold all the materials to change our fate.

Inevitably, spending all this money to learn how to dance meant I would need to actually go out dancing. Which I did this past weekend. I enjoyed myself and I left the same way I always leave when I spend time amongst other humans: sad. (I always wonder if other people experience the same contradiction within themselves: something makes you happy but you are also sad?)

I watch people’s faces when I observe a room, most people do not smile, even if they are experiencing joy, this emotion is —sadly— experienced internally. My favorite people are those who I can laugh with and those who have a genuine smile: I will go out of my way to make people laugh, if it means we can spend a moment of mirth together. No matter how difficult the internal monologue that plays within me I will always smile when I am happy.

What makes me sad: life would be infinitely better if by default we experienced our joy externally with our fellow humans —even strangers. As it is, the majority of you are lanterns dancing through the flow of life without any flame. And, I wish I could change that.

We hold all the materials to change our fate.

—EJB