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.
On Friday, I saw the news that poet Louise Glück had passed away. Food writer Jeff Gordinier wrote in an Instagram post that her collection of poems, The Wild Iris, is “a book that can save your life.” Gordinier noted that her work had been on his mind recently, even before the news of her passing reached him. It hadn’t occurred to me to turn to Glück’s poems over the course of this heartbreaking past week. But I should have, and since Friday,…
Happy Friday, friends. As you settle into your weekend, here’s a little reading material for you. 1. Delicata Squash Butter from Helyn of Helyn’s Healthy Kitchen looks like a scrumptious alternative to almond or pumpkin butter. 2. This Cranberry Walnut Chickpea Salad Sandwich from Julie of the Simple Veganista looks filling and tasty. 3. Janet’s Pan-Roasted Cauliflower Steak is, like all of her recipes, creative and lovely. 4. I’ve been on a soup kick since the rutabaga and parsnip concoction I posted yesterday,…
This week in my Strategies for Nutrition Education class, we spent a little time discussing Self Determination Theory. It’s a behavioral theory that posits three essential conditions of a person’s motivation, engagement, persistence, and creativity: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Autonomy refers to feelings of freedom and self-governance, competence to feelings of mastery, and relatedness to feeling connected and engaged with others. The more these conditions are evoked, the theory goes, the better the chances an individual will have of successfully implementing and maintaining…
Last Sunday, I came clean about being stuck in a cycle of repetitive, anxious thoughts. My friend Maria shared the following response: When I was in my thirties, I had a therapist who suggested something that sounded really counter intuitive to me about my fearful thought patterns. She said that when I started into a worrying self-critical spiral, instead of getting frustrated or mad at myself, to say “thank you” to myself. “Thank you” to that part of myself that was trying to…
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