If You Can Walk You Can Dance

“Start with something simple. Try touching your forehead with your hand. Ah, that’s easy, automatic. Nothing to it. But there was a time when you were as far removed from the mastery of that simple skill as a non pianist is from playing a Beethoven sonata.

First, you had to learn to control the movements of your hands (you were just a baby then) and somehow get them to move where you wanted them to go. You had to develop some sort of kinesthetic ‘image’ of your body so that you could know the relationship between your forehead and other parts of your body. You had to learn to match this image with the visual image of an adult’s body (…) As with all significant learning, this learning was measured not in a straight line but in stages: brief spurts of progress separated by periods during which you seemed to be getting nowhere.

Still, you learned an essential skill. What’s more important, you learned about learning. You started with something difficult and made it easy and pleasurable through instruction and practice. You took a master’s journey” (George Leonard, Mastery)

Now, in your early 20’s, 30’s, 40’s you can touch your nose, right? You can walk and jump, yes? Talk? Well, of course – everybody around you was doing it; learning those skills was unavoidable, you had to fit in. Yet you say you can’t dance…

What if all the people around you were dancing instead of walking? Naturally, you’d be able to dance too. You’re not, because dancing is not one of the skills necessary for our survival. It’s not a basic skill. Yet it is a skill which means IT CAN BE LEARNED. Just because your parents did not teach you how to move gracefully to music, it doesn’t mean that you can’t do it on your own. Your parents taught you how to walk, you should be thankful enough. Walking requires rhythm and coordination, right? There you go. Dancing is a bit more complicated than that because musicality comes into play but you do have the basics!

It is as simple as that: you couldn’t walk, you observed, you practiced, you fell flat on your butt, you got up, you mastered it. You can’t dance? Repeat the same pattern. So what that you’re older now? The only person really stopping you is you.