Gene put it most succinctly. Upon hearing that I decided to take up dancing, he said: "Dancing? But there's no winner in dancing."
Gene has known me since I was probably 10 or 11 years old. And since then, he said, he's come to see me as a consummate competitor, one whose inner fire drove me to rise from just a kid on the block to one of the world's top competitors in a handful of martial arts circuits. So he was greatly surprised when I told him I came to thinking that I should have put martial arts on the back burner years ago.
Somehow, I told him, over the years I grew convinced that my idea of fun -- go figure -- was hitting and getting hit. My idea of a rush was dominating other competitors and, failing that, avoiding being dominated.
"What an idiot I was," I continued, "for not realizing until recently that it’s so much more enjoyable having a beautiful, sexy young woman standing in front of me smiling and wanting me to take her into my arms than to have a thick-skulled Neanderthal-like freak with hairy knuckles grimacing in my direction as he tries to knock my block off."
In an
earlier blog, I mentioned how with five simple words, Ms. LS made me feel sorry for myself for not being able to dance. It was true. I felt sorry for myself because even though I witnessed on a million occassions how much fun everyone can have at dance clubs, bars, and concerts, unless someone pumped my system with a vast amounts of the good stuff, it was my policy to give the dance floor wide berth -- and to top it all off, I didn't have a good reason to explain this.
It may be difficult for most people to understand my aversion to dancing. Hell, as soon as LS said those words, I realized that I didn't understand, either. But for the next few days, I felt compelled to think about it.
For 10 to 15 years people have tried talking me into dancing -- all to no avail.
“Okidude, take up dancing,” the women would say. “It’s so fun!”
“Okidude, take up dancing,” the men would say. “That’s where all the women are.”
“Okidude,” still others would chime in, “With your coordination, I’m sure you’d be a great dancer.”
No matter what they threw at me, however, it was all in vain. I just wouldn’t dance.
Simply put, I'm a martial artist, not a dancer. Now with most people, being one doesn't preclude them from being the other. But I think I’m kind of weird. The idea had been ingrained in me from an early age that dancing was something best left to people who had nothing more honorable to do with their bodies.
Superficially martial arts and dancing may seem similar, as both require the doer to perform stylized body movements that can be quite complicated and beautiful. Although physical coordination may be a commonality shared between the two, however, philosophically there are important and glaring differences. In the martial arts, for example, every move –- every movement –- is supposed to have a purpose, one that is ostensibly non-aesthetic. You put your foot here to maximize your hitting power. You put your hand there to cover against a possible punch to your head. You don’t put your weight on this leg because it will leave you vulnerable to a foot sweep. And so on.
I was trained to believe that when a system of fighting is good, there are few if any extraneous movements in the system's techniques. Moves that have no apparent purpose are deemed flashy … “mere dancing,” in the words I’ve come to hear. To the serious martial artist, these moves are not worth the time or effort needed to perfect them. After all, they brainwashed us into believing that to master a system takes a lifetime, so why would we want to screw around working on techniques that look good but don't work?
I had been steeped in environments that espoused this way for thinking for more than two decades. I tried hard to separate showy moves from serious ones. I tried hard to avoid any despicable dancelike techniques whenever I trained.
Though I had no respect for dancing, this by no means meant I didn't respect dancers. On the contrary, I've always had much admiration for them. In my 25 years of martial arts experience, I've found that most serious dancers seemed to have a much deeper understanding of body mechanics than most serious martial artists; the dancers also seemed more aware of body positioning than most of my contemporaries. And not only did I respect what these dancers could do with their bodies, more importantly, I respected the discipline they needed to rely on in order to go through what had to be intense training.
I felt, however, that the activity they pursued was nothing of which to be proud. Dancing, especially in the minds of most hard-core traditional Japanese martial artists like myself, was a frivolous endeavor. It would be akin to what I think of car thieves, con artists, and serial killers -- while admiration for their talents may be in order, the activities to which these skills are being applied aren't necessarily things I'd want my kids (if i ever have them) to take up.
Add this to the fact that dancing is not by its nature competitive, and you can see why someone like me wouldn't be interested in it. I understand there are dance competitions, but because they are based entirely on subjective criteria, they existed far below my radar. Dance competitions aren't like races, where one car, horse, tricycle, or even one frog comes across the finish line first. They're not like chess matches where one general retires another. They're not like a boxing or wrestling match, where one fighter knocks or taps out the other. In short, in my eyes, dancing, even competitive dancing -- except maybe dance marathons, which award prizes to the dancers who dance the longest -- had, as Gene put it, no winners.
I'm not exactly sure why LS's five words resonated so much within me, but not three days after she uttered them, I signed up for a
salsa class in San Francisco; just days after that I took up
Argentine Tango, as well.
And I've never looked back.
In fact, in the few weeks that I've been studying, I've come to rethink my previous assessment of dancing. As I hope to write about in future blogs, I still believe that dancing indeed isn't competitive. But the lack of competition in this case far from means there are no winners. I've come to see now that the activity is highly enjoyable. And with so many people having fun doing it, it's probably more appropriate to say that in dancing, there are no losers.
