Love on the Dance Floor

     I absolutely and happily admit I have gone to the club to meet women. No question, and I would do it again under the same circumstances. But looking back on those times, I realize that while this choice was instinctual for me, it was by no means inevitable. Proper dancers are a relatively rare breed, and only a handful of us were regular clubbers and ravers. Everyone else was going to bars and mini-golf courses to meet people. I know now that really, I did it because I wanted to meet women who loved to dance. That's why I'm not ashamed. To meet a life partner, one has to do what one loves, and meet other people who love to do that same stuff. I danced, and I hoped to meet ladies who did, too.

     It didn't work back then, generally speaking. In all my club years, I met exactly one woman that I got to date (we're still friends and she's done awesome stuff with her life). At my first proper rave, I met a woman I still count among my best friends, but these two ladies are notable for being the exception. The club was a crappy place to go to hook up with strangers. What we really did there was bond and transcend. 

     I'm trying to write this while listening to dance music. I can't: I have to turn the sound off. It stops the flow, takes me out of sentence- and paragraph-length thoughts. When really feeling a great beat, I can sense the core - the root - of my consciousness because the past and future fall away. There is only the Rhythm Right Now, and it is plenty.

     Spent this past Saturday night on a dance floor. It was my living room, and we were dancing for my birthday. This was the purest dance experience I'd had in a while, and it both satisfied me and left me hungry for more. The core of us was just a handful of people: 10 or so out of the maybe 40 or 50 people there danced all night. We smiled, we sang along, we called for responses, and we responded to calls. We had a comment here and there, but in the way of old friends hanging out, we needed very little to enjoy each other's company. Thus we bond: we deepen friendship through shared experiences. 

     For those of us instinctually wired to love to dance, the richly physical act thereof brings great bodily pleasure. When my favorite song is on or I'm particularly feeling a beat, I will close my eyes, throw my head back and breathe deeply, just to open up to the music as much as possible. I looked around this weekend and at moments saw a roomful of people doing exactly that move, dripping with the sweat of a great workout. When so strongly feeling our physical selves while moving with powerful rhythms, we can easily forget the daily heaviness of life. Dancing takes away my stress, because my body can hold no stress while manifesting rhythm. Dancing cures my worries, because energetic physical movement affirms my existence. Thus we transcend: we move past the daily work of life and feel the play of our bodies in the here and now. 

     We bond, we transcend: this is the truest church I know. In dancing we let go our conscious and separate selves to join in something much greater; These moments are religious experiences. The beauty of it is: we've always had this love on the dance floor, from the nights we went out hoping to meet somebody to the nights we go out ready to celebrate somebody we met years ago. We benefit from dancing in the short and long terms and it takes no belief, requires no faith or dogma. Just a stereo or an instrument, a body to move, and a heart to move it.