The Tree of Good Life
Dancing
Good morning, and welcome back to the Tree of Good Life, where we look at the highways and byways of contentment, wellbeing and happiness.
I said last week that I wanted to start moving on from food to exercise, and here’s a segue that occurred to me. My family spent last weekend at a wedding celebration in Provence. I won’t dwell on the details, but the whole thing was absolutely wonderful, and it started with a feast (delicious food), and ended with hours and hours of dancing (lots of exercise). See what I did there? Food and exercise are natural companions.
Dancing! I’ve always enjoyed it, despite being a completely uncoordinated flailing mess on the dance floor. My limbs do not obey my brain, so I just forget the brain part and move. Releasing the body from the brain in this way is, I think, one of the reasons why dancing is such a lot of fun.
Young people dance a lot, and have opportunities to do so - lots of parties and school discos and college hops and then weddings and festivals and more parties - but as you get older the opportunities just seem to fade away and by the time middle age arrives most men, and some women, think they are past it, that dancing is undignified, or that they just ‘can’t do it’. What a pity.
I got reintroduced to dancing about five years ago when I had a short stay at Schumacher College in Devon. One of the people there put on an ‘ecstatic dance’ session starting at 6 in the morning. I had no idea what ecstatic dance was (it turned out to be just dancing) but I turned up, intrigued, at 5:50 a.m. for a shot of intense hot dark chocolate laced with chilli, and then the music started. Slowly limbering up, and then the pace quickened and then on and on without stopping for an hour. At the end of it I think I must have been in some sort of heightened state. I certainly felt great, if not ecstatic. I don’t think I’ve ever danced at that time of day before or since, but I’d recommend it.
That experience made me think that us older adults don’t get enough opportunities to dance. So I tried to create some by holding a monthly disco in our village hall. The idea was that on the first Friday of the month I would turn up with a playlist, plug it into the sound system there (which is a very good one), and everyone could dance, non-stop, for exactly one hour. There were no frills - no bar, no charge to attend, no chairs put out to sit down on. Everyone who came loved it, and there were about half a dozen who came to every single one, but it never really took off. Numbers varied between 35 and 6. I think the problem was that older people have just got out of the habit ,and are too fearful of making fools of themselves. After two years of trying I gave up, but we still have a village hall disco at Christmas. I have heard of places where the idea has worked. Perhaps my village is just too small - it’s only 400 people - and everyone has so many other things to do. But I’ve found it difficult to find somewhere else to go for a monthly fix of gyrating.
Sometimes I just put on music at home and start to move. We used to dance a lot when our children were little, right into their late teen years. We still have kitchen discos occasionally (we were calling them that in the mid 1980s and I’m sure I should have trade-marked the term).
There are three reasons why everyone should dance. The first is physical: moving and shaking is good for the body, and as you get older it helps to strengthen your limbs and maintain your ability to balance. It also makes you breathe deeply and gets your heart pumping so that your fitness improves and your weight goes down. As good all-round exercise dancing is hard to beat - only swimming uses as many muscles and is as aerobic. Plus, it’s much more enjoyable than a fitness class in a gym.
Dancing is also really good for you mental state, partly because jumping about releases all sorts of good chemicals in the brain, but also because dancing tends to be a social activity. You don’t need a partner to dance because you can easily just move by yourself, but most dancing happens in social situations where, even if you don’t talk to anyone, you feel more connected and less lonely. All of which is good for you and increases your sense of self-worth.
But the third reason is something you don’t hear so much about, and it may seem a bit out-there, but it’s important. Let me explain. The more we have come to know about sub-atomic physics, the more we have realised that every thing we see on this Earth is composed of particles that incessantly move about. Even the hardest rock or the most solid slab of wood is, in one version of reality, a seething mass of particles engaged in an endless lively dance. Nothing around us is really inert or even inanimate. If movement is a sign of life then everything is alive.
A book called the Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra, published way back in the 1970s, explores the ways in which science and religion are reaching the same conclusions about the fundamental nature of the universe. And of course James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis sees the world as alive in the sense of being a self-regulating system that is constantly in flux.
This way of seeing the world - everything alive, everything in movement - radically changes your perception of your place in it, and your responsibilities towards it, and your dependence upon it. But it also makes me think that dancing is one way of celebrating the world. Your body is moving and pulsating all the time, and so is everything you see and touch. Dancing is one way in which you can align yourself with the rest of the Universe. It is a way to celebrate the fact that you, and it, are alive. It’s so much more than mere exercise - it is a joyous, joyful activity, and sometimes even an ecstatic one.
So go on, don’t be afraid. Put on a record, feel the beat, and have some fun.
Until next week, as they say on Strictly: keeeeep dancing!