Rule of life: Always have friends that inspire you to be a better person.
Meet my dear friend Stephanie Barrow. An artist and designer, not to mention a gardener with a magical touch (Her personal slogan: Art and gardens everywhere!) she takes a kind of fearless approach to life, to trying new things, to embrace whatever may be coming next. Last year, she challenged herself to create art daily, anything from a doodle to a full-on painting. And she did it. And those of us blessed to know her got to tag along because she made videos of this journey.
Thursday I danced a new-to-me Nia routine that included a few steps I’ve never done in quite the way we did them. It got me thinking about why I revel in both the new and the familiar in dance.
There’s research describing reasons for this. The brain gets a dopamine hit from new experiences. Dopamine plays a surprising number of roles in the body, among them, producing a sense of pleasure. The right amount of dopamine can make me feel happy, motivated, alert and focused.
Nia also offers the joy of familiar movement. I’ve read that learning builds new neural pathways, which is a healthy outcome. But there’s something also deeply satisfying in knowing what comes next in a choreographed routine and doing it. I particularly like how sometimes my feet just know where to go while I’m attending to other aspects. When I know the steps I can burrow into the music, which is deeply satisfying.
What I know experientially is that Nia feels good physically and mentally with its mix of form — following specific steps — and freedom — moving however I feel. After Thursday’s dance a few of us spent a few moments trying to articulate why we love it so much. Then we laughed and shrugged and hugged and went on to the rest of the day.
What I see depends on where and when I am. If I’d been six feet or so to the right, or five minutes earlier or later, I wouldn’t have seen this bit of rainbow on a mostly blustery day.
Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now 