Footloose: On the Value of Cutting Loose and Letting Go

Yesterday was a good day.  I overhauled the fibre room, clearing out extra yarns, art supplies and assorted things belonging to the category, Things Which No Longer Serve Me. There was a point where, when Mr. DD invited me out to The Church of Robin's, I was not quite sure I'd be able to exit the room, so surrounded was I by Stuff.  (I found a path. Nothing gets between me and my coffee for very long.)

By late afternoon, I had reorganized the area so that there was actual bare space on the floor-not much, but enough that I could walk around my yoga mat if I wished.  In celebration, I spent the evening practising meditation painting, which involves putting on loud music and laying down watercolour brush strokes to the beat of whatever is playing.  No purpose, no goal, just me, my paints and pens and the music. In this case, it was Harry Manx and Friends Live at the Glenn Gould Studio, which was perfect, because that particular album contains a lot of Indian teental beats, which are perfect for  random, but mindful, brush and ink strokes. (There was a time when I danced kathak. Badly. Very badly. My dance career ended abruptly, when my skirt fell off on stage during a group performance. I was in my 40's at the time; the display was neither cute nor charming.)  Later, after an encounter with The Tedeschi Trucks Band's Everybody's Talkin', in which Susan Tedeschi sings the best cover of John Sebastian's Darling Be Home Soon I have ever heard, I had a fit of nostalgia, which may or may not have involved listening to Crosby, Stills and Nash's Greatest Hits while sipping an entire half glass of wine wine and working on a neglected pair of hand knit socks.

I danced.  I sang.  I pranced around my room (as best I could, given the limited space) like a kid in high school.  In kindness to Mr. DD, I did shut the door, but my antics were lively enough that Mick the Cat abandoned his post and sulked off to sleep on our bed.  When things got really wild, Morris barked from the living room in a kind of "Hey, you!  Settle down!" tone. It was silly and fun and exactly what I needed, after a long winter of bitter cold and hard studies.  

Why do I think this is worth a mention?  Well, here's the thing: when's the last time you let loose and let yourself Be?  How often do you practise the saying, "Dance as if no one is watching."?  I know it's been far too long for me.  Most of the time, I live in self-consciousness, wondering and sometimes worrying about what friends and family think, what people think, what I think of myself.  From what I observe, I'm not alone.  As we move more and more into long hours of work, ever at the beck and call of social media, always aware that one slight slip might be enshrined in the public arena, we lose our sense of play. Perhaps if we spent less time immersed in the external world of Selfies and more time in the world of humans, Being, we'd all be better and happier for the shift.

  

Namaste.