...And Love What You Do!
As you might already know, I love to dance! As a child, I dreamt of becoming a ballerina and, although that dreamy ballerina was replaced by an economist, I refuse to stop dancing. And that's the only reason why I decided to join the contemporary dancing group of my university.
This week, we're participating in a festival for dancers from different universities –yes, photos are coming soon!– and, today, I want to share with you one of the things that I have loved the most about it.
On our Saturday, one of the international guests of the festival was present in our practice. He said a couple of things that actually changed the way I think about dancing. The first one, was about performing. Although we are on a stage, we need to communicate with the audience, and to have some contact with them. And this is what our eyes are for. Believe it or not, eye contact is one of the most important expressions of human beings.
But the problem –our guest believes– is that we're forgetting about it. Not only when dancing –or performing, in general–, but in every other aspect of our lives. And this is something we must relearn to do. Eye contact is absolutely necessary, especially when trying to build a relationship with someone else.
The other thing he mentioned –and this is the central point I want to make to day– was to love what we do. None of us in the group is a professional dancer. We all dance for dance's sake, and because we love it. We're economists, engineers, doctors and architects. But, nevertheless, we dedicate several hours every week to our dance practices, and we love doing it!
This is one of the things that our guest said he really loved about us. The problem he recognised was that, during our performance, we were concentrating so much on doing everything right, that we were forgetting to enjoy dancing. And this is absolutely terrible!
We all were shocked by what he said but, after giving it some thought, I think I might agree with him. Sometimes, we get so into our daily activities, that we forget what we do and why we do it. I don't even agree to do homework in a mechanic way. Whenever we do something, we should do it with the heart, because that's the only way it will make us happy; if it doesn't, then it turns into an obligation. Every single action we do is a message to the universe. And we only live once, so we should make sure that we leave the happiest story through our messages.
Today we had our first performance, and I think we all enjoyed how we danced. And I also think we had the words of our international guest in our minds, because there could have been no better performance! We were nervous, since we opened the show. And we were excited to show months of work. But we were also loving to dance. We danced with our hearts. And we danced as a great group of friends, who have learnt to look at each other and work hard towards a common goal.
This is all healthy. Dancing is healthy because it is a physical activity: your muscles activate and your heart pumps full of energy. But it is even healthier if you love doing it with all your heart. And this is probably the only reason why I want to continue dancing until the end of my days!
Love,
