The next step

Posted by admin on Nov 3, 2005 in Featured Articles | 0 comments

When I was younger I thought that growing up must be a little like learning how to dance. I thought that maybe life was some sort of pattern of rhythmically planned out steps and growing older was just learning where to move your feet and when.

I learned how to dance in my junior high gym class. Two-step. Fox trot. Swing. My 13-year-old classmates and I would move awkwardly in jerky steps as our gym teacher would proclaim in time with the music: “slow, slow, quick-quick; slow, slow, quick-quick: now isn’t this FUN everybody?”
Sweaty palms. Nervous laughter. With my female partner towering a good four inches over me and my body’s unfortunate fondness (despite my mind’s vigorous protest) for stomping enthusiastically on her toes when my teacher encouraged us to “feel the music”: No. It wasn’t fun.

However, in learning how to dance there was always the hope that at some point my body would begin to obey the simple commands my mind was sending it. There was always a trust in some pre-determined pattern; a big poster sheet of paper with drawings of feet that marked the page with numbers and told you where to move your feet and when. All I had to do was master the pattern. To be an adult was to learn and know the steps.

Now I am an adult. And I’ve come to know what all adults know: there are no steps. The most frightening thing about becoming an adult, about leaving behind the illusions of childhood is the confrontation with the unknown. It is the forced recognition that any dreams we may have had about life being spread out for us on a big poster sheet of paper that tells us where to move our feet and when will forever be just dreams. There is no security of a pre-determined pattern, a two step that tells us each moment to be moving our feet “slow, slow, quick-quick.” In this unknown, undefined future, our lives are no longer characterized by a sense of safety, but we gain a realm of unfathomable possibilities.

I’m here in my final year of university and at best I can see only shadows of what lies in my future. Part of me longs for a diagram of what dance steps I should take for these next five years, for the next year, for the next semester, for the next day of my life; yet, part of me also recognizes that if I had that I would lose the adventure and excitement of taking each change in the music as it comes, of discovering the uniqueness of what God has planned.
If growing up is like learning how to dance it is not learning a two-step or fox-trot in gym class. That was never fun; it was mostly just painful, humiliating and boring. It left me yearning for the final bell. If life is a dance it is the dance you do when you think no one is watching you do it – it’s that weird, crazy dance you do when your favourite song comes on the radio after a six hour study session and you cannot sit still any longer and just have to move and do something, anything. It is learning to let go. It is a young person’s dance, because it is we who greet the unknown with a fresh face. It is the young who dance because we are the ones who want to stretch out our limbs and test the limits of this new space we have discovered.

In response to the unknown we can yearn for some lifeless poster sheet that tells us where to move our feet and when and be crippled by the fear that comes when we realize it does not exist. Or, we can embrace the opportunity not knowing gives us to move, to throw ourselves into the adventure of what it is to be human, to see that to live is to love, learn, hurt, grow, fear, risk, choose – it is to dance not knowing what your next step will be.

* the dance above is the Mars’ Hill Shuffle. It encompasses much sliding, bounding, twirling, and getting down with your “bad self.”**
**Trinity Western University does not promote nor condone ‘getting down with your bad self/selves’.