I’ve been feeling overwhelmed this week, and my usual coping mechanism is to retreat into my personal routines, practices where I feel invisible, where I can meld into the world around me, feel as if I’m a part of the all-powerful universe rather than my so limited self. Iced coffee outdoor table reading, biking around the park at night, opening to the world in a stretch.
Life is all about making the hard things easy. I’ve never done something for the first time where I’ve felt like a natural at it. I have negligible hand-eye coordination, so every sport I pick up it takes me a long time to get to a decent place. This applies to very precise crafts too. Sewing is herculean. Don’t even let me fold paper; I won’t be able to do it straight. When a shopkeeper in Japan taught my friends and I how to do a simple origami crane, I distinctly remember them making a joke about how I should maybe not go into origami. That didn’t stop me from buying origami paper aspirationally and then never using it.
What I lack in talent, I make up for in work. I just do it over and over and over again until some small part of it starts to feel easy. With dance,
I’m a romantic, which means I want to believe that I can do anything I set my mind to. I’m also an optimist, which means I falsely believe that everything will be ok if I wing it. Narrator voice: things were not okay when I winged them. Winging things deliberately shirking preparation feels very different than trusting your instinct after you’ve developed it. They’re easy to get confused because they both have the same upramp feeling of an uneasy freedom. The former ends in uncomfortable disaster (or an existential angst that sits in the pit of your stomach), while the latter ends in a cathartic release.