The Ballet Mindset

Training as a dancer, particularly in ballet, influenced how I move through the world. The way I’d describe it is a “joyful and graceful intensity.”

Ballet cultivates this mindset in a dancer because…

Ballet is emotional. In ballet you are expressing, through movement and the body, deep emotions. Ballets tell moving and powerful stories, that dance on the boundaries of human experience. Telling those stories takes a special type emotional labor, because expressing emotion and telling stories without dialogue is a unique challenge.

Ballet is technical. Dancers don’t seem to float, soar, and spin effortlessly because they’re “just born with it”. It’s practiced and drilled. As a ballet dancer, I spent almost half of all my classes at the barre, developing technique. And during a ballet class the first skill you practice, over and over, is learning is to plié - which is literally just learning how to bend your knees. Seriously, as a ballet dancer you spend a remarkable amount of time learning something as simple as bending your knees properly. And from there it builds: it’s technique around pointing toes, posture, moving arms, jumping, landing from a jump, body positioning, body lines, turning, and so on.

Ballet is athletic. Miss Luba, my Ukrainian ballet teacher, used to say that as a dancer you could be doing the hardest jump, lift, or arabesque, but to the audience it always has to look easy. To do that takes tremendous strength, power, body control, and endurance. Ballet is so hard on the body. Of all the sports I ever played, a really tough ballet class was a special kind of physical and mental beatdown. If you don’t believe me try it. Stand on your toes on one foot, hold your arms out from your shoulders, or just jump continuously and see how long you can do this without stopping or grunting in anguish. There’s a reason why ballet dancers are jacked.

Trying to be emotional, technical, and athletic all at the same time takes intense focus, To boot, ballet dancers cannot just go through the motions or rage uncontrolled through a recital. They must perform: physically, mentally, emotionally, artistically, and technically. And the ballet dancer’s craft shapes their mindset into one of joyful and graceful intensity.

As Americans, our culture often emphasizes winning, aggression, strength, dominance, and power. At extremes, I wonder if that encourages, bullying, hostility, and violence.

Being king of the hill isn’t the only way to live and make a unique contribution. It’s one of many choices.

For me moving through life with a ballet mindset, rather than one of dominance, is a contribution in itself. Because acting joyful and graceful intensity is what brings beauty into this world.

I’m grateful to my teachers and dance peers. Because of them, I know that a seemingly paradoxical orientation of joy, grace, and intensity is even possible.

Noticing good days

I am trying to remove the concept of bad days out of my mind. Meaning, I’m trying to fully understand that the way I want to think about it is that bad days don’t exist.

There are so many wonderful things about days after all.

The sun, the wind, and the rain, and the fog, and the snow, and the hot and cold. There is deep breaths. There is the chance to wiggle my toes or have a glass of water. Or I can put on a sock. I can blink, just for fun or skip if I want to.

There’s also noise and touch and light, but also silence and the gentle darkness of stars and moonlight. And there’s the feeling of having a body, and things like sweating or a grumbling stomach. Or wishing or hoping or praying for something. Or a funny joke. Or the sweet relief of weeping about something.

And for me when Robyn says “good morning” and gives me a kiss, just about makes my day right when it starts. Or a hug from one of my boys or talking to our parents. Or a quick “hey” from an old friend, too. And I get that we are lucky to be enveloped in love and our relationships are bound by life, they still exist and will have existed.

These are all examples of little joys that actually aren’t little at all.

I’ve been thinking about it like fine chocolates. Many moments in a day are simply exquisite, like a morsel of well made chocolate. But even the finest chocolate can’t be noticed as exquisite if we just put it in our mouths, hurriedly, and just crunch-crunch-crunch, swallow and move on. And these little-but-actually-big joys are the same, even the most remarkable moments aren’t remarkable if we don’t savor them when we have them.

I know that bad moments happen. Sometimes, those moments are really horrific and truly terrible. But I want to also know in my bones and muscle tissues that bad moments don’t imply bad days. Bad moments can imply hard days, sad days, angry days, or even days of hopelessness and despair. But that doesn’t have to be bad.

And all this said, I know my days could be orders of magnitude harder if we weren’t as healthy, wealthy, or loved as we are. With temporal distance, even the hardest days of my life so far, like when I’ve done things that hurt others or the day I had to let my father go ahead without me, weren’t bad. They were unbearably hard, but I don’t have to think of them as bad, as if I wanted them to be wiped from existence. 

Because if those days were wiped from existence, it’s one less day with all the good moments a day can have - even if those good moments are hidden in plain sight, waiting for us to notice them. If even one of those days were wiped from existence, I couldn’t have lived them.

And one definition of injustice to me is when there are people on this earth that have so many bad things happen to them that all the little things that can make a day good, even for a moment, remain hidden in plain sight. That they have so many struggles, and so much unbearable pain and disappointment that they aren’t capable of noticing even one good moment that day, even something as simple as the goodness of waking up from sleep or breathing.

I want my mind, my body, and my heart to understand what my soul already does: that good days don’t have to do with the trappings of how “lucky”, “blessed”, or “privileged” I am. That the “good” in a good day in life comes just from living. I want all of me to understand what my soul already does, that every day is a good day and every single one of those days matters.

Dreams, from joy and the conviction of their own souls

Raking leaves is one of those chores I don’t want to do until I’m doing it.

Until I’m with rake in hand, I’ve forgotten the crispness and soft chill of the air, and the sound of the brushing leaves. It’s sweatshirt weather. But I also forget that sweatshirt weather is also “thinking weather.”

As I raked yesterday, I escaped to thinking about dreams. And my subconscious drew me not to thinking about what my dreams are, but rather, “what influenced me to have the particular dreams that I do?” And for me, so much of my dreams are wrapped up into my parents’ dreams for me.

To be a “big man” or a man of great community respect. And I wondered why they had those dreams for me, and I think it must have been, at least in part, because of how they were treated when they arrived in this country. As immigrants, I don’t imagine they ever felt accepted or welcomed, at least for the first few decades of their arrival.

And when you’re an “outsider” respect and wealth protects you from harm - whether that is rude service or dirty looks in public, or more unfortunately, a brick through your window. I imagine my parents’ pain is something that influenced me to want the dreams that I wanted early in life. Pain is a powerful influence.

But my dreams were also influenced by the broader culture whose collective opinion skews toward a hedonistic, lowest common denominator and accepted malaise . Let’s call those the dreams of “the herd”.

The herd wants me to hold its dreams as my own, because it’s a mechanism of justification. It’s harder to criticize the herds hedonistic aspirations if they convince me (and others) to be part of it. The more people the herd co-opts, the more their dreams - however dishonorable they may be - become normal. Just like pain, the herd is a powerful influence.

So early in life my dreams were influenced by two things, avoiding pain and succumbing to the herd’s mentality. That’s where “I want to be a Senator” or a “social entrepreneur” came from - those were two dreams that pain and the herd led me, specifically, to.

And I’ve let go of those dreams, not because I grew out of those dreams, but because I grew out of pain and the herd’s mentality. Mostly through luck and blessing, some very special friends and family helped me to discover joy and my own soul. It’s a journey less like climbing a mountain, and more like a long, lonely walk.

It’s a journey I am still on, but my dreams are now about a growing family, goodness, the honor of public service, and sacrifice for a community bigger than myself. I still fall into the traps laid before me by pain and the herd, I am after all a mortal man. But these dreams - borne of joy and what lies within the core of me - are a far cry from the version of myself that was nakedly ambitious, longing to be on the Crain’s 20 in their 20’s list.

Honestly though, the point isn’t about me, nor should it be.

The point is this: I can only hope - for our children, and the children of our friends, family, and neighbors - that the generation up next spends less of their life having their dreams influenced by pain and the herd than I did. I hope, deeply, that more of their dreams, and really their lives, are instead influenced by joy and the convictions of their own soul.

Here’s how I’ve been thinking about how we do that.

Joy, Sacrifice, and Cattails

“These are cattails, Papa!”

When we were at the Metropark, I had another one of those moments where I can see the world through our sons’ eyes. “Dang,” I thought, “Bo finds joy, somehow, wherever he is.”

And I began to contemplate, how does he do that? Bo was as happy, peaceful, and silly-seeking as he ever is finding Cattails with Mommy and chasing Dadi around a tree, on this grassy pointe we were on at this lake, on an otherwise unremarkable Saturday morning. 

And I was nostalgic, perhaps even a bit jealous as I watched him, laughing and enjoying the outside.

What happens to us along the way that makes it so that such little pleasures aren’t enough?

Later that week it hit me, one day our sons will grow out of this mindset too, and it will be my fault. 

As they grow, I will teach them to sacrifice for the future. I will have no choice but to. Trade one cookie now for two cookies later sort of stuff. Or, study now so you can earn a living later. Or, that kid came a long way to play here, want to help him up the slide instead of going yourself?

All the examples, and more, are ones that hold the basic structure of: invest for the future so the future can be better, it will be worth the wait.

And that point of view, will probably lead to him believing that there’s more to life than cattails, so to speak. 

As part of this growing up and learning to sacrifice, he will form beliefs on what “better” and “worth the wait” are. And my big gasp came when I realized that he will learn that from me. 

As he learns to make sacrifice, his perceptions of why we should sacrifice will come from me. Should it be to lift up ourselves, or lift up others? Should we always strive for more? What is valuable, money and status? Character? Nature? Family? Being popular? Faith? 

My example will dramatically influence what our boys will perceive as valuable and therefore what they sacrifice for. 

I hope we can live up to that responsibility. And with any luck, at my age, Bo will still find joy in little things like cattails on a sunny day at the lake.