Let's Dance — Interruption #18

We need to stop ranting and start dancing

A few months ago, a friend told me that her New Year’s Resolution was to dance whenever she felt like dancing.

It was such a perfect resolution. I told her I was going to copy her and adopt it myself. I don’t need the pressure of self-improvement goals, the inevitable guilt when I fall short. But a resolution that asks me to simply be more present in my body? Yes, yes, I’ll take it.

Unfortunately, modern American society offers precious few opportunities to dance. Especially when you’re a 44-year-old white woman who doesn’t like to stay out much past 11 p.m.

I did go dancing with this friend and two others, and we even managed to stay out until midnight. We danced our asses off. It was life affirming. But I also spent a lot of money and suffered the consequences for staying out past my self-imposed curfew. There was a lot of planning involved. I had to find a place that didn’t feel too “clubby,” where we wouldn’t feel self-conscious as 30- and 40-somethings on the dance floor.

I look forward to a Big Night Out again, but it’s not something I’m going to do often.

Where else can I dance, though? I dance a lot in my kitchen as I prepare dinner and listen to the hip hop blaring through my daughter’s bedroom door. Otherwise, opportunities for dancing are few and far between. They rarely simply present themselves.

In her recent story, Joy Is a Strategy: The White Leftist Struggle with Spirit,

Jamila Bradley

articulated my conundrum perfectly. She said:

That’s where even the most well-meaning white leftists start to feel adjacent to accelerationists—because there’s no clear path in their ideology toward life. Toward joy. Toward the actual practice of creating safety and abundance. Something I think about a lot is how liberation has always been spiritual, always been embodied. There’s an ancestral component to this. Getting ourselves free has always involved spirit, and always involved the body.

White leftism these days seems to be all about anger and resistance. Yes, there’s a lot to be angry about and there’s a lot to resist. But when we get stuck in “anger and resistance mode,” we are, in a sense, letting The Other Side win. We’re letting them take away our joy. We’re letting them entrap us in reactivity. We cease to envision, build, and create.