Motivation

Today I woke up at seven thirty in the morning. This is a good thing. In fact, I would like to wake up much earlier. But since I was not accustomed to waking up at that hour, guess what? I ended up going right back to sleep. Now it's past one in the afternoon, and I have returned to my web journal after a long absence to ask: What would be a good morning ritual to kick start a day?

In the past few months I have been attending a ballroom dancing class at the studio my sister also attends. It started out for the benefit of my mother, who complained that she rarely gets a partner. So I joined, and was surprised at how efficient this activity was in getting me to break a sweat. Which, I guess, was the point; ballroom dancing is supposed to look easy.

Recently, as the date of the company's annual concert neared, I became given to saying out loud, "Let's get this down good, guys, so we can take this to the concert!" This usually gets a laugh, mostly nervous, from the other participants, who are mostly parents of the students at the company. It is clear that they would rather not perform for the concert, and would rather just watch it. My mother chimes in during our dinner conversations thus: she thinks that the company director wouldn't put ballroom students in the concert programme unless they were of a certain quality, i.e., they were good enough.

All well and good, of course. The steps given to us by the instructor, I admit, look very simple and easy, not well-suited to be performed for a concert. If they were any more complex, we wouldn't have time to learn it in an hour. And it probably takes about three weeks to a month of serious dedication to master a dance-number-length routine, even if it were only made up of simple steps.

But to me, the thought of taking it to the concert is a useful legal fiction. One, I already noted how it makes other people laugh. Sometimes it will appear to me that ballroom practice is getting too serious; my utterance just shakes it off just a little. And another, more important reason is that even though I don't seriously expect to perform for the program, my thinking that I would be included causes me to show off a little bit more, in effect, to make it look more effortless than it actually is. This helps squeeze both sweat and attitude from me, and in the end I know I must have danced much better.

And anyway, if I can't perform for the concert, I always have my graduation party. ^_^

Thanks for reading.

Song in my head: Santana, "Samba Pa Ti".