Do It Like It's Part of the Dance
My current favorite quote & how it might be changing everything for me...
If you’ve spent time with me the last few weeks, there is a one hundred percent chance you’ve heard me talk about this quote from Ram Dass:
“You can do it like it’s a great weight on you, or you can do it like it’s part of the dance.”
Phew, right? I love it so, so much.
A little background, if you’re not familiar with Ram Dass: he was an American spiritual teacher—he wrote books and gave retreats until his death in 2019, and his book Be Here Now, written in 1971, is largely credited with bringing an awareness of Eastern mindfulness to Western popular culture in the 70s. Be Here Now is a classic--I read it and loved it when I was in high school, and I just bought Henry a copy for Christmas.
One of the best parts of parenting, I’m finding, is how much our children teach us: Henry practices simplicity and mindfulness in ways that instruct and inspire me every day…he’s far better at those things than I am, and his perspective helps to shift mine so often these days.
I don’t even know what I was looking for when I stumbled upon this quote, but I remember the mindspace I was in when I found it, and that mindspace was…well, carrying absolutely everything like it’s a great weight on me, which is kind of my natural impulse. I have this thing, this gear, this knee-jerk to doing it the hard way.
This looks a thousand different ways: in a silly example, I routinely buy more groceries than I can carry home, and so I’m literally ‘doing it like it’s a great weight on me.’ Or I get into hustle mode all of a sudden, wishing everyone around me would focus and hurry up and stay on task—it’s go time, people!
I get like this when I’m overtired sometimes, or when I’m stressed about something I don’t want to admit I’m stressed about, or when I feel like the people around me aren’t being nearly serious enough, like all their playfulness means I’m going to need to be the workhorse. Must be nice. (‘Must be nice’ is always a red-flag phrase for me—it’s always a signal that I need to look inside myself at a resentment or some envy I don’t want to admit.) Isn’t it weird that people being loose and playful would make me mad, like I want everyone to be struggling like a martyr because I’m struggling like a martyr? I say this 100% as a confession—I don’t like this way of being, but it’s very, very familiar.
Somewhere along the way I learned that it should hurt, and by it, I mean everything. I picked up the message that if it’s too light and lovely, if there’s too much ease and beauty in your life, you must not be doing enough, carrying enough, pushing hard enough. It was communicated to me a thousand different ways that if you’re not always right at the maximum threshold of stress and exhaustion, you must be lazy or…(gasp!) low-capacity. I learned that if you can do more, you must, and that if you aren’t wrung out & stressed out, you must not be trying hard enough, doing enough, carrying enough.
Even writing all this gets my shoulders scrunched up around my ears. I don’t believe those things anymore. Those beliefs cost me a lot over the years. They kept me hustling and exhausted, resentful and envious. Of course I believe in service, in meaning, in giving and generosity as a way of life, as a cornerstone of my faith. But I don’t believe that living in a way that hurts you every day gets you cosmic extra credit. I believe that joy and play and lightness and beauty are available to all of us, right now, not just after the work is done (because if you buy into productivity-as-worthiness mindset, the work is never done).
It’s because of the years (decades!) I spent in this trap that this quote hits me so deeply, because what it suggests is that maybe you can do the exact same thing two entirely different ways—maybe it doesn’t have to hurt. Maybe nearly all of life can be done with lightness or with heaviness, as play and celebration or as a heavy load to bear. Maybe we get to choose.
To be clear, there are some things in our lives that are just absolutely heavy weights to bear, and to try to dance through them would be grotesque—you don’t have to dance through grief or abandonment or abuse or loss. You don’t have to dance through suffering—that’s not it at all.
But it seems to me that there are a lot of things in our lives that maybe we could dance through. I had a writing deadline a couple weeks ago—one that, to be honest, I was very very behind on, and that I spent about a zillion hours catastrophizing about. As I took a closer look at all of it, though, why?
Writing isn’t brain surgery or brick laying—what I mean is that no one dies if you get it wrong and also it’s not physically demanding in any way…why was I carrying this project like such a heavy load? What if I approached it like play, like an adventure, like a dance? I can feel my shoulders rearrange themselves even as I say this to myself. A new looseness, a new lightness when I imagine the things I’ve been carrying so heavily as part of the dance instead.
Dance, of course, is important to me. I was with some old friends a couple weeks ago, and I was struck again by how centrally their identities as athletes shape their understanding and their imaginations. When one of them approaches something difficult at work or at home, she thinks of training, consistency, strength building—all the things that an athlete might bring to a physical challenge. I categorically do not think of anything with an athlete’s mindset, but I do understand what it is to be a dancer.
I was a dancer possibly before I was anything else in the world—even before I was a reader, even before I was a beach baby, I was one of those little girls that had to be reminded over and over to actually sit in my chair at the dinner table, instead of standing behind it using the back of the chair as my own ballet barre. I counted eight-counts in my head all the time, listened to Swan Lake over and over on a record player at my grandma’s house. When it was my cousin’s turn to decide what we were playing, she was the teacher and I was the student, and when it was my turn to decide, I was the choreographer and we were the dance troupe.
My deepest self knows exactly what it means to do it like it’s part of the dance—my shoulders lift, my spine lengthens, and I get ready to move. Dance is about movement, about traveling through physical space, about using your body to say something that can’t be captured in words. It’s a wordless conversation between the music and your neck and your hips, the bass sounding deep in your chest, the stretch and reach of your muscles and your spine.
Embodiment, as a word and as a concept, is everywhere right now, and with good reason. The post-enlightenment modern age loves ideas, beliefs, heads, right-thinking. But more and more often these days, mental health experts and doctors and spiritual guides are gently reminding us about our bodies—our lovely, flawed, hard-working, beloved arms and legs and hearts, imperfect and special and powerful. To dance is to practice embodiment in the simplest, most immediate way. Simple, immediate—and sacred.
Another thing I love about it: part of the dance—that’s important, too. As a person who’s been learning choreography for most of my life, I understand that there are parts: slow parts and fast parts, simple parts and complicated parts. Some of what makes a great piece of choreography is the contrasts—if it’s all big movements, the audience glosses over. If it’s all too subtle, the audience ends up squinting, overthinking it. The best pieces are a mix of wild and deliberate, big and small, physically challenging and physically restrained…just like life. Just like how it is to be a person in a world of a lot of beauty and a lot of suffering, a lot of joy and a lot of howl.
If we can understand the heavy things in our lives as one part of the dance but not the whole, then we can anticipate lightness to come and remember the lightnesses of the past, too. I remember from my years of learning routines and choreography that there were stretches of a routine you really had to focus on--your full mind, your whole body--and then it was almost like in doing that complex section, you earned a little reward in the next section, auto-piloting and free for a few measures. It’s not all easy, and it’s not all hard—it’s all part of the dance.
At my brother and sister-in-law’s wedding, there was a lot of dancing—there was a great band, and many of us danced for hours, but there was one of us who was on a completely different plane: my niece Vivian danced like I’ve rarely seen anyone dance in all my life. She wiggled and twirled and jumped, she punched the air above her really fast and really hard, she ran in place, she did the splits over and over, flinging herself down onto the ground and popping back up, over and over again. It was one of the most beautiful and most outrageous things I’ve ever seen.
These days when I feel myself settling the yoke of whatever’s heavy on my shoulders like I’m an ox in a field, I stop myself just for a moment, and I think instead of beautiful, wild Vivi. I shake my shoulders a little, tossing off the yoke. I breathe deeply, and I start to count us in…5…6…7…8!