To live the life we want

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When I started  contact improvisation dancing, one of my first and best teachers was an Australian dancer and teacher, Janis Claxton. I came across her when she was living in Bristol. And although I was living in Glasgow, I would fly down to Bristol and do her dance workshops. And they were just fantastic.

In 2005 she moved to Edinburgh, enabling me to work with her much more.

Because she was such a skilled teacher and choreographer, as well as a brilliant dancer, the people that she tended to attract were professional dancers.I wasn’t a professional dancer ( I was a litigation lawyer then);I didn’t have any dance training. I hadn’t been to dance school. None of that. I just loved dancing. And I felt quite insecure, among these professional dancers, who had received extensive training and were obviously also a lot younger ( and thinner) than me.

I would express this doubt and uncertainty to Janis, who would say, ‘Nonsense, nonsense. My dancers all love you.’And I would think, sure.

.In the event my doubt got the better of me, I didn’t really throw myself into the dance community that she created in Edinburgh, which, as it turned out,only lasted a few years because her choreography work took her to China, and elsewhere

The opportunity was lost.

And  I thought at the time- 

“I can pick this up at some future point, when I am a bit more confident or when I am a bit more settled”, or whatever.

Janis got lung cancer,and died at the age of 51.

There was no opportunity for me to dance further with her.

.At her funeral, I came across one of her dancers, She hadn’t seen me for quite a wee while, but was very warm: ‘Oh John, it’s great to see you.’ And then she said,‘You know, whenever you would come along to the workshops, we would  say to each other, “hey, there’s John! anything could happen!.’

So sweet. So bittersweet.

.So what lessons to learn?

.The first is that we need to know ourselves. We need to know our own nature, our needs, and our wants and  act upon them.Not  be deterred by this great ghostly wraith of doubt and fear. Because fear eats the soul.

And a similar resolution to act is very important for questions relating to  sexual happiness, which are much more central to the being of all of us than dancing

 For a happy and meaningful life we need to understand our own sexual nature. Because when we understand that nature, we can understand what that calls forth in us.What we want to do how we want to connect with people, how we want to feel.

That’s the most important thing,

how we want to feel.

And  not do what I did and say, “well, I can do this tomorrow”because there might not be a tomorrow. Fear doesn’t need to say Never. It only needs to say Not Now. We treat time as being of limitless extent, but with each breath 

it’s falling away from us.