Dance
Like a Fool
“A
person who is not afraid of looking like a fool gets to do a lot more dancing.”
Margaret
Renkl
One of
the greatest gifts of aging—in my opinion—is getting over the constant concern
we have about how we look. Let’s face it, by seventy, unless you have constant
surgical intervention, parts of the human body begin to migrate south. This
causes a time of body-shaming, to be sure, especially in cultures where beauty
is the primary yardstick for measuring a woman’s worth. There are equally
superficial yardsticks for measuring a man’s worth, but it isn’t usually their appearance.
Once we
get past looking in a mirror and seeing an alien being there, there is freedom
to be who we are at this stage of life. Here is what we are not—the prettiest,
shapeliest, fastest, strongest. Here is what we can be: the freest, most
genuine, most authentic, and truly, the funniest we have ever been. We can say
what we think, do what we love to do; we can laugh at ourselves but with the
same gentleness and kindness we show to others. We lose the self-consciousness
that came with trying to look good all the time, and dance just as much as any
other fool—even without the alcohol lubrication.
If I
had a dime for every time my mother asked, “What will people think, Jane?” I
would be a rich woman. Toward the end of her life, she was living in a nursing
home. She had a roommate who would take off her clothes at night before she
went into the bathroom for her nightly bathing ritual. Mother, at 84, was absolutely
scandalized. “She walks around here buck-naked,” she told me, wide-eyed with
outrage. When I probed this a little bit, asking, “What is it that upsets you
about that, Mother,” she hemmed and hawed and finally said, “I’m afraid somebody
will think it’s me!” Mother worried a lot about what people thought—about her and
about me, as an extension of her.
Worrying
about what people think of us is a subtle form of grandiosity. It requires that
we believe, first, that people are thinking about us at all, and secondly, that
we have the power to control what they think of us. Worst of all, it is like
wearing a tight girdle—a full-body, mind, and spirit girdle. In other words, it
constricts us, contracts us, and squeezes out a whole bunch of life that we
could be living. The 12-steps folks have a truism for this: “What someone
else thinks of you is none of your business.” Truly, it says more about
them than it says about you. Here is my suggestion: young or old, good looking
or not, just dance as much as you want and let the chips fall where they may. Life
is to short to wear a girdle.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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