I’ve been fortunate to see a few wonderful dance performances this summer.
The first was a performance of Glass Pieces in May, which I wrote about the following Sunday.
In the past two weeks, I’ve seen productions of Romeo & Juliet and Like Water for Chocolate.
Three very different kinds of dance performances, spanning the distance from classic to contemporary. Each one of them was exhilarating.
I’ve always loved going to the ballet, but I didn’t use to prioritize it as much as I have in the last couple years.
Over the weekend I was thinking about why the art form is resonating with me so much right now. Why is it elevating and inspiring me more than opera, or theater, or other forms of performing art that I’ve always enjoyed?
The thing that I keep coming back to is that I tap into some sense of freedom as I watch a dance performance.
Ostensibly, I’ve experienced geographic freedom this month, through taking a vacation. There’s tremendous freedom in my life in the form of countless privileges, and also in the fact that I don’t have dependents.
Internally, though, I often feel paralyzed.
Increasingly, especially in the last two years, I’ve felt so insecure. This makes self-expression and professional expansion suddenly a challenge.
And, as I’ve mentioned many times in recent weekend reading posts, I’m so much more fearful than I used to be. Is there anything more inhibiting than fear?
No wonder it’s such a meaningful time for me to observe movement—beautiful, graceful, exuberant movement.
A yoga teacher said in class this week that everything healthy in nature is moving, or flowing, somehow.
Maybe this rekindled love of watching dance will somehow help me to release that internal immobility, that feeling of being stuck. I believe in the power of art, and I believe that it’s possible.
Happy Sunday, friends. Here are some recipes and reads.
1. Wired magazine makes a case for maintaining a sensitive, nuanced, and up-to-date understanding of how sex differences impact healthcare, from drug development to anesthesia dosing.
2. The remarkable story of one ultramarathoner’s comeback from a traumatic brain injury.
3. People around the world were shocked and saddened to learn of the killing of Cecil the Lion in 2015. This article uses that event and its aftermath as a case study in altruism as it occurs within and between species.
4. I stumbled on a Grubstreet article from 2021 about Courtney Kennedy, a chef who left the fine dining world to cook instead at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital, serving patients with cancer.
I love the way Kennedy describes her shift in sense of purpose: “There is no ego, in other words, only a desire to make patients feel cared for.”
5. This article proposes that curiosity and uncertainty are two ways of framing the same thing, which is our response to the unknown.
It describes a recent study that used brain scan data to demonstrate that human curiosity seems to grow in response to increased uncertainty created by visual images.
This leads to a question, which is whether we could train ourselves to respond to all uncertainty with curiosity, rather than anxiety or perceived threat:
“Another way people can deal with other forms of uncertainty is to intentionally treat it the way their brains automatically treat the visual kind. It might be as simple as a matter of reframing. For instance, Amy Poehler once described dealing with nervousness by reframing it as excitement, since the two feelings resemble each other: ‘That way you acknowledge the physical feelings without putting a negative spin on things.’
The same goes for uncertainty and curiosity.”
It’s an interesting possibility, right?
This occassionally-anxious person is hoping to dance through the coming week with more curiosity than fear, more excitement than unease.
Happy Sunday, friends. I hope this weekend reading post finds you staying warm and well. It’s been a hectic few days here, as I finish up a big freelance project in time for the start of my new semester. Amazingly, that semester begins this coming Thursday. It feels as if my first semester just ended, and I wonder if I’ll feel the same way in May, at which point my whole first year will be behind me. When I first told people I was going…
This week, I was reunited with my friend Christina. It had been a few years since we’d seen each other. We ought to do a better job of keeping in touch, but my clinical internship and her training in med school haven’t made it easy. Christina and I met just as I was finishing the final year of my post-bacc program. She was quiet and kept to herself, at least at first, but anytime we were called to get something done—in a lab,…
I read Rachel O’Meara’s article on the importance of pauses—especially as a tool for reevaluating professional direction—about a month ago. I took interest in the piece because I’ve been working to slow down these days. Not too long ago I mentioned that I tend to force decisions, or make them too precipitously. My intention—to be proactive and not overthink things—is sensible enough. But when I act too quickly I often regret it; I end up wondering whether I might have come to a clearer and more…
Happy Monday, everyone! I’m back from Colorado, where I had a great time. It would have been difficult not to enjoy the trip, given that Ashley and I haven’t seen each other in a long time and had much catching up to do as friends. But my hope had been that the week would be professionally restorative, too–an anecdote to some of the creative frustration and general burnout I’ve been feeling. And it was. I’ve promised myself that I’d ease back into the…
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