Dancing in the copy room

I probably shouldn’t admit this, knowing how many of my coworkers read these posts, but if you creep around the corner of the copy room quietly, so that I don’t know you’re there, you might catch me in the act of dancing at the copy machine to whatever song is in my head. I bop around so mindlessly that sometimes I’m the one who catches myself, realizing halfway through a verse that I’ve been nodding my head and shaking my hips to whatever music is chasing me around that day.

Dancing is fun. I laugh and let others laugh at me because of my love of shaking my thing, but there is a side of it that I take very seriously – not because I think it is something at which I will ever excel, but because moving is so integral to who we are. God gave us bodies so that we could use them.

People come up to me at weddings and say things like “wow…you really like dancing…” I earn no accolades for my skill or grace, but I always earn an A for enthusiasm. Honestly, if my being a little wild makes people feel free enough to venture on the dance floor or even to accost a stranger to comment on her dancing, then I’m not going to complain. Setting the bar for lack of inhibition has always been one of my gifts.

Tonight, at the suggestion of a friend, I went to a casual dance class on the other side of the river. The instructor, at the beginning of class, advised us to “just have fun”, and I laughed to myself, thinking she doesn’t know what she’s in for. So we danced, and I had fun and probably horrified her a little at what great joy I take in my own bad dancing.

I love the mind and soul as much as the next person, but sometimes the body is where the power is. It would be easy to spend most of my life trapped inside of mine, because I would embarrass or hurt myself, or because I was scared of what other people think. There’s too much music in my head for me to ignore it, so I intend to keep dancing around the copy machine, hoping I don’t get caught.