Day 8 - Dance, dance....

After this year’s Oireachtas - the Mid American Irish Dance Championships – held over Thanksgiving weekend, I took a hiatus from giving private Irish dance lessons.  I don’t give very many, but I kind of enjoyed the months of always having my Saturday and Sunday mornings totally free.  Today I went back to giving lessons, and I rediscovered how much I really love teaching dancing – to all children, but in this case – to champion level dancers.

Irish dancing is a passion of mine that, over the years, friends and acquaintances have asked me why I love it so much – why I continue to have it be such a part of my life.  I’ve always been at kind of a loss of how to answer that question, because the answer is so complicated.  When something is so woven into the fabric of your life, it becomes impossible to distinguish the threads from the pattern.  All I know is that from my very first lesson I loved dancing.  I loved the music, the movement, and the feeling of my body flying through space.  As I started competing, I loved the shoes, the socks, the dresses, the curly hair and later the sparkles, the fake tanner and the wigs.  I loved the thrill of performing on stage, and the butterflies of competition.  Beyond all the amazing people I met and places I traveled, at the end of the day I just loved the art form.  I still do – and now I love to teach it.

As I gave a lesson to a champion level dancer today, I felt how quickly I clicked back into my role.  I love teaching talented dancers because it is a little like editing an amazing essay.  I take something that others already see as beautiful, and help the dancer to make it even better.  I watch a step that, to an untrained eye looks perfect, and can spend thirty minutes or more working on it - tightening an arch here, pushing an ankle a little farther forward there, pausing a hair of a second longer for effect in one corner, and jumping a few inches higher in another.  When I was a competitor myself, I was often blind to my own dancing – consumed by the stake I held in it.  I relied on my amazing teachers to help me see it for what it was – to make it incrementally better each time I stepped foot on a dance floor.  It is so incredibly gratifying to do the same thing for another – to help a dancer reach her full potential.  It’s a gift.

So rather than doing or really even finding something new, today I saw a gift in my life in a new light.  Sometimes we have to step away from something we really love to realize how much it means to us – what a gift it is in our lives.