Dance [publisher's letter]

“They say” that living in the past is not a good thing, and they would likely be right. It’s funny, though, sometimes when I look to the past, I recall things that I would like to be doing again. Take, for example, dancing. The article in this month’s edition “The Joy of Movement” reminded me of how much I used to love to dance―something I seem to have forgotten over the years, as I’ve been caught up in, well, life.

When I was a young adult, they still had dances in some of the hotel ballrooms, and we would make good use of those spacious rooms with the fancy floors. Whether it was a country-western dance hall, the neighborhood bar with a great rock band, or a tiny living room at someone’s house party, I can confidently say that I logged thousands of hours on dance floors.

New Year’s Eve was a particularly favorite holiday of mine, and I don’t ever recall having one without dancing. Every year my friends and I would seek out somewhere that we thought would be fun—rock, country and western, reggae. It didn’t matter what the genre of music was, we could dance to it all. And dance we did, all year round. It wasn’t a resolution, we just loved to dance!

Because dancing wasn’t a physical activity that I had to force myself to do (like working out at the gym), it didn’t seem like a workout, but it surely was! On one occasion, I brought a friend to one of my favorite dance halls. She had never danced to country-western music, and she likened it to a strenuous cardio session. I can tell you one thing, we were happy, lean machines―not an ounce of body fat.

I think that looking to our younger days for glimpses of what our lost passions might be—back to a time when we just did things because we could or because they were fun—is a useful exercise. And perhaps it doesn’t hurt to revisit some old passions with renewed enthusiasm.